Ubuntu
glibc package

What happened to glibc_2.31-0ubuntu9.3?

Asked by Martin Ritter

Hi,

I have a system where I cannot install libc6-dev because of unmet dependencies:

The following packages have unmet dependencies:
 libc6-dev : Depends: libc6 (= 2.31-0ubuntu9.2) but 2.31-0ubuntu9.3 is to be installed

So I checked and indeed libc6 is installed as version 2.31-0ubuntu9.3 but this version doesn't exist in the repository (e.g. https://packages.ubuntu.com/focal-updates/libc6).

$ apt-cache policy libc6
libc6:
  Installed: 2.31-0ubuntu9.3
  Candidate: 2.31-0ubuntu9.3
  Version table:
 *** 2.31-0ubuntu9.3 100
        100 /var/lib/dpkg/status
     2.31-0ubuntu9.2 500
        500 http://nims.desy.de/ubuntu focal-updates/main amd64 Packages
     2.31-0ubuntu9 500
        500 http://nims.desy.de/ubuntu focal/main amd64 Packages

Weirdly there are still mentions of this package in google caches and for example there's a changelog (http://changelogs.ubuntu.com/changelogs/pool/main/g/glibc/glibc_2.31-0ubuntu9.3/changelog) but no package.

So I'm wondering what happened here.

Thanks,

Martin

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Martin Ritter (martin-ritter) said : 		#1

Ok, I finally found https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/glibc/+publishinghistory and can guess why it was deleted from the comments

But I have to wonder why it was just deleted and not reverted and the old version bumped to 9.4 or similar?

This version was in the update pocket for more than a week so the changes are high that it might be installed with automatic updates.

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Manfred Hampl (m-hampl) said : 		#2

Because of Bug #1926355 the version 2.31-0ubuntu9.3 of libc was withdrawn, which may lead to the error that you see for everyone who updated libc between 2021-04-26 and 2021-04-27

Try this:

sudo apt install libc6=2.31-0ubuntu9.2

Revision history for this message
Martin Ritter (martin-ritter) said : 		#3

Thanks, I already downgraded manually. And this does solve the original question

But if I may follow up on this:

Why was the update just withdrawn without any replacement? Now it seems to me anyone that has updated to this version has to downgrade manually until 9.4 comes around.

So I just wonder if what the procedure is. Naively I would have expected a revert in this case (aka republish the previous version with a higher version number) to let updates handle this transparently. There are probably good reasons why this didn't happen, I just wanted understand them. I wasn't even aware that versions can just be deleted without replacement from the update pocket.

Revision history for this message
Manfred Hampl (m-hampl) said : 		#4

This is not the only incident of a withdrawal of a new version in the recent past.
I don't know either, why it was done this way.
The debian version numbering scheme (also used by Ubuntu) even tells how to name a replacement of a reverted package, see https://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ch-controlfields.html#epochs-should-be-used-sparingly

should have been something like 2.31-0ubuntu9.3+really 9.2

You should consider commenting in one of the related bug reports, e.g. Bug #1926918