Re: cvs glibc install fails

[Chiaki Ishikawa]

X-PMC-CI-e-mail-id: 15970 

Hi,

>(but of course if the library is screwed up your system will be hosed,
>make sure you have static file utilities around somewhere to point the
>link back at libc-2.2.2.so if things break).

Does anyone know of depository (or repository? I am not sure what is
the right English word) of statically linked file utilites
available on Internet? 

I just hosed myself on Sunday when I became adventurous to try
"unstable" and "testing" Debian packages to test a certain
new packages, and failed to recover cleanly. 
(Debian's nice apt-get tool tried to keep me from shooting myself
in the foot, but I added "--force-..." option to override the
apt-get warning, and ended up in unusable system.)
 
As Justin Guyett suggested, I longed for statically linked version of
"tar", "ar", "mv", "cat", "ls", "cp", etc.. when I made
vain attempts to recover gracefully.

I am now writing this from a somewhat old linux in different
partition. (Yes, I was at least lucky enough to have enough disk space
to hold a bootable linux image and filesystems in a separate partition.)

The range of statically linked utilities that one needs in case of
dynamically-linked shared library screw-up is not quite clear to me,
and thus I wonder if anyone has already set something up already.

As I tried to make the older linux partition usable for my current
work, I needed to download surprisingly many packages, and thus the
list of statically linked binaries that are necessary to recover may
be large and/or contain somewhat unexpected commands. (I forgot to add
"bash" or "sh", and "ln" in the above list, for example. "ed" or
"vi/ex" might be necessary for a quick edit job. 
I wonder if we need statically-linked "gcc", "gas", and/or "ld" also.)

Come to think of it, Sun offers a small number statically linked
binaries [for OS upgrade purposes?]. So OS distribution such as
Linux, *BSD, etc. could learn from the practice.

Anyway, if anyone knows of any such offering or just the
possible list of commands, I would appreciate it to learn about it.




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