Title: migrating from glibc[crypt] to libxcrypt in ~arch Author: Andreas K. Hüttel Author: Sam James Posted: 2021-07-23 Revision: 1 News-Item-Format: 2.0 The implementation of libcrypt.so within glibc has been deprecated for a long time and will be removed in the near future. For this reason, we are following other distributions (where this has been tested for years already) and switching to the external libxcrypt implementation, starting with ~arch installations. This will be a regular update, and in nearly all cases you will not have to take any action and not observe any problems. We do recommend, however, that your system is *fully* up to date first. This is a standard recommendation but in this specific case, it is useful to have a simplified depgraph to ensure that Portage is able to smoothly calculate an upgrade path. That is, please take the opportunity to fully upgrade your systems now, before the migration occurs, to simplify matters. This change will occur on 2021-07-14 for ~arch users. Stable users will update at a later date. If for whatever reason you do *not* wish to switch now - which is only delaying the inevitable - you need to take the following steps: * unmask and enable the crypt USE flag of sys-libs/glibc * mask the system USE flag of sys-libs/libxcrypt * mask >=virtual/libcrypt-2 If you wish to manually migrate now, there are a series of steps described on the wiki (see below), but the outline is: * unforce the crypt USE flag of sys-libs/glibc and disable it * unmask the system and split-usr (if applicable) USE flag of sys-libs/libxcrypt and enable it * unmask ~virtual/libcrypt-2 Please note that if you last changed your password before ~2008, it may be using md5crypt or similar other weak mechanisms in /etc/shadow; a bug in PAM [0][1] may mean that you were unable to login. We recommend using "passwd" to change/refresh your password so it is using modern methods. A new version of PAM has been added to the tree to resolve this issue. In some cases, Portage may schedule a rebuild of certain packages in an incorrect order [2]. If building a package fails, please try upgrading libcrypt and libxcrypt first: # emerge -v1 virtual/libcrypt sys-libs/libxcrypt And then continue the world upgrade with Portage's "--keep-going=y". For more information or troubleshooting tips, please see: * https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Project:Toolchain/libcrypt_implementation * https://bugs.gentoo.org/699422 [0] https://bugs.gentoo.org/802267 [1] https://bugs.gentoo.org/802807 [2] https://bugs.gentoo.org/802210