When updating my system last night via emerge -u world, package glibc-2.3.1-r4 was emerged when glibc-2.3.2-r1 emerged successfully, May 14, 2003. Many applications were updated to use glibc-2.3.2 including python, vi, kde and of course emerge and ebuild. Needless to say, most of the KDE applications like Konconcourer and the emerge itself crashed. This is unrecoverable without a backup or by using the glibc-2.3.2-r1 tarball and building manually (as I did). Problem was traced to package.mask doing '=sys-libs/glibc-2.3.2-r2' and '=sys-libs/glibc-2.3.1' and a package that depended on glibc being version 2.3.1 at least caused the dependent emerge of 2.3.1-r4. If you are going to mask both glibc-2.3.1 and 2.3.2-r2, mask all versions in between as well else a SNAFU like mine will occur.
Same thing happens to me - I'm copying over glibc from my Debian installation to attempt to get portage working again.
As this appears not to have been fixed yet: (newb here. forums are unavailable, so perhaps this is useful information for the ebuild manager?) ...so... THAT's what happened. that's the last time i'll do a -u world. The *real* problem I had is that the python (v2.2.3) that I have required glibc-2.3.2 to run, so I couldn't emerge glibc-2.3.2 back in. I was stuck -- couldn't emerge glibc 2.3.2 or python 'cause python was broken because it required glibc2.3.2. but when I do emerge --search glibc there is no glibc-2.3.2-anything available. there is no glibc-2.3.2 listed in the online package database (on the web site), and none elsewhere that i could find. I could only find: /usr/portage/distfiles/glibc-2.3.2.tar.bz2 (I don't know where I got that from....) I had to manually build it, install it, and now I'm sitting on it with (no doubt) some library version mismatches, waiting for an ebuild of glibc-2.3.2 to be made available... This is a pretty serious problem, I would think,
glibc-2.3.2 is in unsable keywords. If you got it, it's because you did ACCEPT_KEYWORDS="~<arch>" at some point and then went back to a stable profile. That means glibc was downgraded. http://cvs.gentoo.org/~avenj/bins/ contains a binary tbz2 of glibc-2.3.2 for situations like these. Also check out the README in that directory. This is a support issue, not a bug.
that was a screw up on our part -- what is your gcc/glibc version and hardware please? I'll make you a binary package for python.
