[lug] Weird glibc upgrade problem

[Justin]

Well this problem happened to me a while but I was able to fix it on my 
slack7.1 box. Now, just today it happened on my friends RH7 box and I'm 
wondering if anyone else has seen this.

In my case, I was upgrading to the latest glibc on my slackware 7.1 
installation. I was using pkgtool to remove the existing glibc and then 
I was going to do a fresh install of the new glibc. Well, when pkgtool 
started removing glibc it crashed out and dumped me back to a prompt. 
At this point my system was hosed, I didn't have any /usr/bin or /bin 
programs, ie: ls, cd, mv, cp, grep, ps, reboot!, shutdown...nothing. I 
couldn't do anything, I ended up hard booting the box and booting back 
to a boot disk. Same problem...from there I booted to my slackware 
installation cd and fooled thru the installation process and managed to 
re-install only the packages that contained the binary's that I needed. 
All fixed, so I then try to upgrade my glibc again with pkgtool just 
for giggles. Same crash out sequence again...and I'm dead in the water. 
So another hard boot and restore later, it's back up. I finally got my 
glibc upgraded by using the command line package tools (I think 
anyways). 

Moving to today, my friend is upgrading his glibc on his RH7 box using 
rpm. This failed miserably too, oddly enough in the same why my 
slackware box did. We tried removing the old glibc packages with --
nodeps with a plan to reinstall the new ones from scratch. Well, during 
the rpm -e --nodeps glibc glibc-common it too failed out with an exit 
status 255. My friend is now hosed in the same boat I was, no common 
commands (ls, cd, mv, cp, reboot, shutdown, etc). 

Has anyone else come across this nonsense? At first I thought I just 
messed something up somewhere along the line. Until today when my 
friend ran into the same thing, but with a different package manager, 
same packages. I don't understand how trying to remove glibc could 
result in such a disaster as this. Anyone thoughts?

Justin

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