NixOS/nixpkgs

m4 doesn't work under WSL

bobvanderlinden opened this issue · 2 comments

Issue description

While building a system using nixops on on Windows through WSL I ran into the following error:

localedef: ../sysdeps/unix/sysv/linux/spawni.c:360: __spawnix: Assertion `ec >= 0' failed.

This is a problem with WSL that doesn't support a specific kernel call that is being used in glibc and in turn m4 (see microsoft/WSL#1878).

Commit e05b877b63dce73ff6d38b1feab337e2ffb89778 in glibc needs to be reverted to work around this problem.

I presume this isn't a patch that people want to rebuild their system for, so I'm wondering what the best practice is to do a hotfix without rebuilding all packages. I found an issue about security patches, for which the solution comes close (replacing a dependency for a single package), but I'd like to replace glibc system-wide. Is that possible?

Steps to reproduce

Use nixops to build a system and m4 is being used.

Technical details

  • System: Windows 10
  • Nix version: 1.11.9
  • Nixpkgs version: 17.09pre107131.c882b967c1
  • Sandboxing enabled: no
stale commented

Thank you for your contributions.

This has been automatically marked as stale because it has had no activity for 180 days.

If this is still important to you, we ask that you leave a comment below. Your comment can be as simple as "still important to me". This lets people see that at least one person still cares about this. Someone will have to do this at most twice a year if there is no other activity.

Here are suggestions that might help resolve this more quickly:

  1. Search for maintainers and people that previously touched the related code and @ mention them in a comment.
  2. Ask on the NixOS Discourse.
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This is quite old and WSL is superseded by WSL2, which works fine. 👍