The Medkit

Last change: 2002-01-26

To download, just save the links (In Netscape: press the right mousebutton and select Save Link As...).

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When do I need this medkit?

You need this kit if you have a libc 5.4.x or later. These libc}s do not contain all the functions that the older ones contained. If some of your programs (that worked fine) do not or only partially work after you upgraded to the new libc-5.4.x, probably aborting with messages like "can}t resolve symbol xxx", you may get this kit to get them running again.

Is this a bug in the pentium-libc?

No, its not a bug in the pentium-libc, all newer libc}s (even the }officially distributed} ones) have this problem.

How do I use it?

Just download the .tgz file, unpack it (with }tar xvpzf medkit.tgz}) go into that subdirectory and read the README.

I want to know exactly what}s going on

Some functions, like the new function in C++, need support in the C++-compiler (g++ in our case) as well as in the library.

When gcc-2.7.2 was released, the need arised to include stubs for these functions. Since the gcc was already released and libc releases are much more frequent than gcc releases, these functions were incorporated into the libc.

This had one drawback: since these functions are in the shared libc image, and not in the executable (e.g. netscape), one could not move this functions into gcc without breaking existing applications. These applications have to be recompiled with a new version of gcc (the soon-to-bo-released gcc-2.8.0).

Beginning with libc-5.4.x, these functions were finally removed from the libc and moved into gcc, since thats the place they really belong to!

The medkit simply provides a small (7k) shared library that just includes the missing functions. If this library is preloaded when starting applications they should work again.

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