Hello everybody! My brother plays Insurgency Sandstorm a lot and I wanted us to be able to play together, so I got it and after some messing about got it working on my system. One of the things I read in forum posts to do to get it to work on an Arch based system is to install glibc-eac-bin which has some patches to make certain games work (I hope I understood that correctly).

Today when I try to update my system I get the following message and it will not allow me to continue:

:: Starting full system upgrade...

resolving dependencies...

looking for conflicting packages...

:: glibc-2.40+r16+gaa533d58ff-1 and glibc-eac-bin-2.40-1 are in conflict. Remove glibc-eac-bin? [y/N]

I dont want to remove glibc, but i want the message to go away and to be able to proceed with my updates. Any suggestions on what I should do?

Thanks in advance

  • ReversalHatchery@beehaw.orgEnglish
    2·
    3 months ago

    It does not mean much if this is 1 patch file or 20. Any amount of changes can be packed in a single patch file. I think OP was rather interested in the security perspective: does the eac patched glibc reduce security in any way? If not, what does it change at all?

    Personally I would assume it does, because otherwise why would there be a separate patched version, instead of including all the changes in the main glibc everyone uses?

    • Lucy :3@feddit.orgEnglish
      1·
      3 months ago

      As per the patch file:

      [PATCH] force --hash-style=both to keep compatibility with old niche software

      Per SO:

      –hash-style allows you to change the format of hashtable which is used for runtime symbol resolution […]. The GNU hashtable format is said to be slightly faster. […] Both simply means that linked files will include, um, both gnu and sysv hashtables.

      So it’s just a patch to enable legacy stuff, with the potential drawback of slightly worse performance (which is given anyway in this case, because EAC bloat. Your usual software should be compatible with and therefore prefer the usual default of GNU hashtables, while EAC, that POS, will use the worser hashtable.)

      • ReversalHatchery@beehaw.orgEnglish
        2·
        3 months ago

        Oh, thanks for looking it up. This sounds good and harmless.

        Now it would be interesting to know if there’s a legitimate need for this, or EAC just can’t be bothered to fix their software.

        • Lucy :3@feddit.orgEnglish
          1·
          3 months ago

          I’m not that knowledgeable, but I guess it’s EAC’s fault: Apparently every application known to mankind, that uses glibc, is compatible with (the better) GNU hashtables. Except EAC. It may just be some incompatibility out of their reach, but then I wonder why every other program, native or run via wine, does not have this problem. My guess: They discovered that they could quietly remove GNU hashtable support, and therefore annoy most linux users, while just saying “your stuff is not compatible with my perfectly fine program”.