Bug 151059 – glibc: cannot downgrade even when it's the sane thing to do

• Product: Gentoo Linux
• Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE

[Description Roc Vallès 2006-10-12 11:46:06 UTC]

I've recently build glibc-2.5 after doing a quickpkg of 2.4-r4. This new glibc is totally borked and so everything segfaults. Ok, time to downgrade.

I booted some livecd, unpacked the old one to /, till now it's okay. Rebooted into my gentoo.

Now, since that / untaring I just did was very dirty, I mask the new version and try to emerge --usepkg, so that portage is aware of what glibc I do have and where, but I cannot, thanks to a nice "no downgrade" die in the ebuild.

Worst thing is, editing the ebuild doesn't help. The tarball itself seems to have the ebuild on it, but not as a file (!) because I tried unpacking it and searching for the file: No luck!. Probably it's the "trash after the end of the file" that tar complains about.

Should I be hexediting the package tarball so that it allows me to downgrade? I think I shouldn't have to go that far.

In my opinion, the "no downgrade" die in glibc ebuild should have a set-and-go environment variable, so that inmediatly after upgrading into a borked glibc people can do stuff like this:

FORCE_DOWNGRADE_GLIBC=YES emerge -K ./glibc-2.4-r4.ebuild

[Comment 1 Jakub Moc (RETIRED) 2006-10-12 11:47:39 UTC]

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 150078 ***

[Comment 2 emerald 2006-10-12 12:43:10 UTC]

i resolved that issue for me by changing the ebuild - commenting the 'die' line (1074 in 2.4-r3) in pkg_setup() and creating new digest and afterwards recompiling the whole thing... (i actually didn't try the package way)
one place where the problem for you may lie is the package-database, there every installed package with the ebuild file is kept, maybe there you need to change the ebuild too.. (deleting might be risky if you want the old version to be unmerged/cleaned afterwards)