How should I avoid damaging my system when I install GNU libc?
{ZW} If you wish to be cautious, do not configure with –prefix=/usr. If you don’t specify a prefix, glibc will be installed in /usr/local, where it will probably not break anything. (If you wish to be certain, set the prefix to something like /usr/local/glibc2 which is not used for anything.) The dangers when installing glibc in /usr are twofold: • glibc will overwrite the headers in /usr/include. Other C libraries install a different but overlapping set of headers there, so the effect will probably be that you can’t compile anything. You need to rename /usr/include out of the way before running `make install’. (Do not throw it away; you will then lose the ability to compile programs against your old libc.) • None of your old libraries, static or shared, can be used with a different C library major version. For shared libraries this is not a problem, because the filenames are different and the dynamic linker will enforce the restriction. But static libraries have no version informatio
