Bug 176233

Summary:	inotify support in sys-libs/glibc-2.5 stopped gnome-base/gnome-menus-2.18.0 from emerging
Product:	Gentoo Linux	Reporter:	Sam Jacobson <sam>
Component:	New packages	Assignee:	Gentoo Linux Gnome Desktop Team <gnome>
Status:	RESOLVED INVALID
Severity:	normal
Priority:	High
Version:	unspecified
Hardware:	AMD64
OS:	Linux
Whiteboard:
Package list:		Runtime testing required:	---

Description Sam Jacobson 2007-04-27 12:02:16 UTC

The problem occurred when trying to emerge gnome-base/gnome-menus-2,18.0 (currently hardmasked). Configure complained about inotify support missing from libc. I was running glibc-2.3.6, so I upgraded to glibc-2.5, but the same error occurred.

I did a little digging, and eventually wrote a very simple c program that just called inotify_init to see what the error was. gcc (3.4.6) gave the following error: "inotify_init is not implemented and will always fail..."

This stumped me. I ran /lib/libc.so.6 and it told me that libc was compiled against kernel 2.6.11. This confused me because I'd compiled it a few hours beforehand and am running kernel 2.6.19. I eventually realised that this was the version of sys-kernel/linux-headers installed. I upgraded this to linux-headers-2.6.17, reemerged glibc-2.5, and now the problem is fixed.

This doesn't seem to be a problem in gnome-menus, I've only listed it because that was where I found the problem, and may be where other people find the problem. Should glibc-2.5 be dependant on linux-headers-2.6.17? Or should it have an inotify USE flag that makes it dependant? It seems a bit broken to me at present.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1.emerge linux-headers-2.6.11
2.emerge glibc-2.5
3.attempt to emerge (or compile) any program that uses inotify from libc

Actual Results:
A compiler warning: "inotify_init is not implemented and will always fail...", or a configure error (triggered by the compiler error)

Expected Results:
No compiler warning, and an inotify that works. NOTE: inotify_init returned -1 when it was broken (and the compiler gave a warning), it returned 3 when it was working.

I run a mixture of testing and stable packages. While this *could* have contributed to the problem I only run stable packages in 'system'. I have not tried glibc-2.4.

Comment 1 Rémi Cardona (RETIRED) gentoo-dev

2007-04-27 17:17:54 UTC

You should always update your system using "emerge -Du world" or better yet "emerge -DuN world". Glibc and kernel-headers would have been updated in the process.

Thanks for reporting anyway :)