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authorRoland McGrath <roland@gnu.org>2004-12-19 09:41:58 +0000
committerRoland McGrath <roland@gnu.org>2004-12-19 09:41:58 +0000
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* version.h (VERSION): 2.3.4.
* README.template: Various updates. * README: Regenerated. * NEWS: Mention ports. * README-alpha: File removed.
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- GNU libc SNAPSHOT SYSTEM
- (general info)
- Updated 1997-9-26
-
-WHAT ARE GNU libc SNAPSHOTS
----------------------------
-
-Snapshots are an "image" of the main glibc development tree, captured at a
-particular random instant in time. When you use the snapshots, you should be
-able to maintain a local copy of libc that is no more than one day older than
-the official source tree used by the libc maintainers.
-
-The primary purpose of providing snapshots is to widen the group of motivated
-developers that would like to help test, debug, and enhance glibc, by providing
-you with access to the "latest and greatest" source. This has several
-advantages, and several disadvantages.
-
- First the advantages:
-
- o Once we have a large base of motivated testers using the snapshots,
- this should provide good coverage across all currently supported
- glibc hosts and targets. If a new bug is introduced in glibc due to
- fixing another bug or ongoing development, it should become
- obvious much more quickly and get fixed before the next general
- net release. This should help to reduce the chances of glibc being
- released to the general public with a major bug that went unnoticed
- during the release cycle testing because they are machine dependent.
- We hope to greatly improve glibc's stability and reliability by
- involving more people and more execution environments in the
- prerelease testing.
-
- o With access to the latest source, any diffs that you send to fix
- bugs or add new features should be much easier for the glibc team
- to merge into the official source base (after suitable review
- of course). This encourages us to merge your changes quicker,
- while they are still "fresh".
-
- o Once your diffs are merged, you can obtain a new copy of glibc
- containing your changes almost immediately. Thus you do not
- have to maintain local copies of your changes for any longer
- than it takes to get them merged into the official source base.
- This encourages you to send in changes quicker.
-
- And the disadvantages:
-
- o The snapshot you get will be largely untested and of unknown quality.
- It may fail to configure or compile. It may have serious bugs.
- You should always keep a copy of the last known working version
- before updating to the current snapshot, or at least be able to
- regenerate a working version if the latest snapshot is unusable
- in your environment for some reason.
-
- If a production version of glibc has a bug and a snapshot has the fix,
- and you care about stability, you should put only the fix for that
- particular problem into your production version. Of course, if you
- are eager to test glibc, you can use the snapshot versions in your
- daily work, but users who have not been consulted about whether they
- feel like testing glibc should generally have something which is at
- least as bug free as the last released version.
-
- o Providing timely response to your questions, bug reports, and
- submitted patches will require the glibc development team to allocate
- time from an already thin time budget. Please try to help us make
- this time as productive as possible. See the section below about
- how to submit changes.
-
-
-WHO SHOULD TRY THE SNAPSHOTS
-----------------------------
-
-Remember, these are snapshots not tested versions. So if you use
-these versions you should be able to
-
- o make sure your system stays usable
-
- o locate and hopefully fix problems
-
- o to port glibc to a new target yourself
-
-You should not use the snapshots if
-
- o your system is needed in a production environment which needs
- stability
-
- o you expect us to fix your problems since you somehow depend on them.
- You must be willing to fix the problems yourself, we don't want to
- see "I have problems, fix this" messages.
-
-
-HOW TO GET THE SNAPSHOTS
-------------------------
-
-At the moment we provide a full snapshot weekly (every sunday), so
-that users getting a snapshot for the first time, or updating after
-a long period of not updating, can get the latest version in a single
-operation. Along with the full snapshot, we will provide incremental
-diffs on a nearly daily basis (whenever code changes). Each daily
-diff will be relative to the source tree after applying all previous
-daily diffs. The daily diffs are for people who have relatively low
-bandwidth ftp or uucp connections.
-
-The files will be available via anonymous ftp from alpha.gnu.org, in
-directory /gnu/libc and on linux.kernel.org in /pub/software/libs/glibc. The
-directories should look something like:
-
- libc-970921.tar.gz
- libc-970917-970922.diff.gz
- libc-970922-970925.diff.gz
- .
- .
- .
-
-Please note that the snapshots on alpha.gnu.org and on
-linux.kernel.org are not always in sync. Patches to some files might
-appear a day a diff earlier or later on alpha than on kernel.
-Use always alpha or always kernel but don't mix them.
-
-There are sometimes additionally test releases of the add-ons available in
-these directories. If a new version of an add-on is available it is normally
-required for the corresponding snapshot so always pay attention for these.
-
-Note that we provide GNU gzip compressed files only. You can ftp gzip
-from ftp.gnu.org in directory pub/gnu.
-
-In some cases the dates for diffs and snapshots do not match like in the
-example above. The full release is for 970921 but the patch is for
-970917-970922. This only means that nothing changed between 970917 and 970922
-and that you have to use this patch on top of the 970921 snapshot since the
-patch is made on 970922.
-
-Also, as the gcc developers did with their gcc snapshot system, even though we
-will make the snapshots available on a publically accessible ftp area, we ask
-that recipients not widely publicise their availability. The motivation for
-this request is not to hoard them, but to avoid the situation where the
-general glibc user base naively attempts to use the snapshots, has trouble with
-them, complains publically, and the reputation of glibc declines because of a
-perception of instability or lack of quality control.
-
-
-GLIBC TEST SUITE
-----------------
-
-A test suite is distributed as an integral part of the snapshots. A simple
-"make check" in your build directory is sufficient to run the tests. glibc
-should pass all tests and if any fails, please report it. A failure might not
-originate from a bug in glibc but also from bugs in the tools, e.g. with gcc
-2.7.2.x the math tests fail some of the tests because of compiler bugs.
-
-Note that the test suite is still in its infancy. The tests themselves only
-cover a small portion of libc features, and where tests do exist for a feature
-they are not exhaustive. New tests are welcome.
-
-
-GETTING HELP, GLIBC DISCUSSIONS, etc
-------------------------------------
-
-People who want to help with glibc and who test out snapshots
-regularly should get on the libc-alpha@sourceware.cygnus.com mailing
-list by sending an email to libc-alpha-subscribe@sourceware.cygnus.com.
-This list is meant (as the name suggests) for the discussion of test
-releases and also reports for them. People who are on this list are
-welcome to post questions of general interest.
-
-People who are not only willing to test the snapshots but instead
-really want to help developing glibc should contact
-libc-hacker-subscribe@sourceware.cygnus.com.org to be put on the developers
-mailing list. This list is really only meant for developers. No
-questions about installation problems or other simple topics are
-wanted nor will they be answered.
-
-Do *not* send any questions about the snapshots or patches specific to the
-snapshots to bug-glibc@gnu.org. Nobody there will have any idea what
-you are talking about and it will just cause confusion.
-
-
-BUG REPORTS
------------
-
-Send bug reports directly to Ulrich Drepper <drepper@gnu.org>. Please
-do *not* use the glibcbug script for reporting bugs in the snapshots.
-glibcbug should only be used for problems with the official released versions.
-We don't like bug reports in the bug database because otherwise the impression
-of instability or lack of quality control of glibc as a whole might manifest
-in people's mind.
-
-Note that since no testing is done on the snapshots, and snapshots may even be
-made when glibc is in an inconsistent state, it may not be unusual for an
-occasional snapshot to have a very obvious bug, such as failure to compile on
-*any* machine. It is likely that such bugs will be fixed by the next
-snapshot, so it really isn't necessary to report them unless they persist for
-a couple of days.
-
-Missing files should always be reported, since they usually mean there is a
-problem with the snapshot-generating process and we won't know about them
-unless someone tells us.
-
-Bugs which are non-obvious, such as failure to compile on only a specific
-machine, a new machine dependent or obscure bug (particularly one not detected
-by the testsuite), etc should be reported when you discover them, or have a
-suggested patch to fix them.
-
-
-FORMAT FOR PATCHES
-------------------
-
-If you have a fix for a bug, or an enhancement to submit, send your patch to
-Ulrich Drepper <drepper@gnu.org>. Here are some simple guidelines for
-submitting patches:
-
- o Use "unified diffs" for patches. A typical command for generating
- context diffs is "diff -ru glibc-old glibc-patched".
-
- o Use the "minimalist approach" for patches. That is, each patch
- should address only one particular bug, new feature, etc. Do not
- save up many unrelated changes and submit them all in one big
- patch, since in general, the larger the patch the more difficult
- it is for us to decide if the patch is either correct or
- desirable. And if we find something about the patch that needs
- to be corrected before it can be installed, we would have to reject
- the entire patch, which might contain changes which otherwise would
- be accepted if submitted separately.
-
- o Submit a sample ChangeLog entry with your patch. See the existing
- glibc ChangeLog for examples of what a ChangeLog entry should look
- like. The emacs command ^X4A will create a ChangeLog entry header
- for you.
-
-
-BUILDING SNAPSHOTS
-------------------
-
-The `best' way to build glibc is to use an extra directory, e.g.:
-tar xzf libc-970921.tar.gz
-mkdir build-glibc
-cd build-glibc
-../libc-970921/configure ...
-
-In this way you can easily clean up (since `make clean' doesn't work at
-the moment) and rebuild glibc.
-
-
-NECESSARY TOOLS
----------------
-
-For the recommended versions of gcc, binutils, make, texinfo, gettext,
-autoconf and other tools which might be especially needed when using patches,
-please read the file INSTALL.
-
-
-HOW CAN YOU HELP
-----------------
-
-It helps already a lot if you just install glibc on your system and try to
-solve any problems. You might want to look at the file `PROJECTS' and help
-with one of those projects, fix some bugs (see `BUGS' or the bug database),
-port to an unsupported platform, ...
-
-
-FURTHER DOCUMENTATION
----------------------
-
-A lot of questions are answered in the FAQ. The files `INSTALL', `README' and
-`NOTES' contain the most important documentation. Furthermore glibc has its
-own 700+ pages info documentation, ...
-
-
-
-And finally a word of caution: The libc is one of the most fundamental parts
-of your system - and these snapshots are untested and come without any
-guarantee or warranty. You might be lucky and everything works or you might
-crash your system. If you install a glibc snapshot as primary library, you
-should have a backup somewhere.
-
-On many systems it is also a problem to replace the libc while the system is
-running. In the worst case on broken OSes some systems crash. On better
-systems you can move the old libc aside but removing it will cause problems
-since there are still processes using this libc image and so you might have to
-check the filesystem to get rid of the libc data. One good alternative (which
-is also safer) is to use a chroot'ed environment.
-
-Thanks for your help and support.
-
-Thanks to Fred Fish from Cygnus for the original version of this text
-(for GDB).
-
-
-Ulrich Drepper