Re: glibc-2.8 tarballs?

[Mark Seaborn <mrs at mythic-beasts dot com>]

Ulrich Drepper <drepper@redhat.com> wrote:

> Allin Cottrell wrote:
> > Thanks for the tip.  Somehow I feel more comfortable building 
> > glibc from an "official" versioned tar.gz, though maybe that is 
> > just superstition on my part.
> 
> Tarballs are a completely outdated concept.  I've said multiple times
> that I won't waste my time on them.  Tarballs are static.  If I would
> have made a 2.8 tarballs then I shortly afterwards would have had to
> made 2.8.1 and perhaps more.  There are always going to be changes.
> That's what appropriately-tagged branches in CVS are for.  You take the
> latest version of the release branch and you know you have the version
> which you are intended to use.

How is that substantially different from getting the latest-numbered
tarball from a directory, except that it is much harder to list CVS
tags than list a directory?  (How do you list tags across a whole
repository in CVS anyway?  CVS usually only shows tags per file.  How
do you find the tags you're intended to use among all the
"fedora-glibc" tags?)

You can easily get a version other than the one you are intended to
use if you forget to give the -P option to "cvs co", in which case you
get a glibc source tree that will not build.  By the way, the
instructions for checking out of CVS on http://sourceware.org/glibc/
are missing the -P option.

Tarballs may be outdated but they are widely supported by tools; more
so than CVS.  Some people consider CVS to be outdated.

Tarballs can be md5summed; there's no standard equivalent for a CVS
tag, and CVS allows tags to be removed.  Tarballs can be easily
mirrored; doing that for CVS is not trivial.

The CVS port is often blocked by firewalls.

If you don't want to upload a tarball, perhaps someone else can be
given access to do that?  The same goes for updating
http://www.gnu.org/software/libc/, which currently states that "The
current version is 2.7".

Mark