[KLUG Members] KLUG Meeting Notes - 11/12/2002

[Peter Buxton]

On Wed, Nov 13, 2002 at 03:55:19PM -0500, adam@morrison-ind.com wrote:

> > One member was getting help with Cyrus IMAP installation and
> > configuration.  Heard this fellow had not just one, but two, 
> 
> Cyrus IMAP rules!!!  Did you get it figured out?

Yeah. We figured out that he needed flex, bison, libssl-devel,
cyrus-sasl-devel, gcc, kernel-headers, libc6-devel.... Couldn't find
kernel-headers on our RH mirror, and the home site was busy. :(

Speaking of which...

I remember when I figured out why it's libc6 and glibc/glibc2, and
realized some people might not know why (I didn't for a long time):

A-Way back when, Linus and crew needed some standard C library headers.
The natural source would be the libc maintained by the Free Software
Foundation (pronounced guh-noo') but it wasn't as capable as they
needed. No problem, thought the happy kernel geeks, we'll split the code
and make our own.

Much later, about kernel 1.3 or so, their libc was up to version 5, or
libc5. But when they looked over at the GNU folks' libc, which was still
version one point something, they saw that immense functionality had
been added that wasn't present in libc5. Realizing that porting one libc
to the other would be folly, they decided that they may as well convert
their kernel to the upcoming glibc version 2. Of course, 2 != 6, and they
thought about asking the GNU folks to go from version 1.something to
version 6: and then they thought, This is *Stallman* we're talking about
here!

And that is why libc6 == glibc2, and why the 2.0 Linux kernel was such a
big, hairy, incompatible (but very important(1)) deal.


(not) The End




1. Well, that and SMP support. And VFS, and...

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