gatewayasteroid wrote:Hi, is this really not harmful at all? I remember it overwrote some files...
Yes, this is really not harmful at all. The files that were overwritten were exactly the same (bit by bit) as the files that overwrote them, so no harm done. In fact, all files present in any of the glibc-* packages are also present in the main glibc package. So if you want to have the glibc *.so libraries you could have either the main glibc or the glibc-solibs package installed. If you remove one of those packages, you'll see that files that are common between packages will stay installed.
gatewayasteroid wrote:Why Slack13 has that package and Salix not?
Slackware provides both the main glibc and glibc-* packages (glibc-solibs, glibc-i18n, glibc-profile, glibc-zoneinfo). The user is free to choose which one he wants to install. If someone wants to have only the solibs package installed, so he can have a system as minimal as possible, he can do just that. If he wants internationalization, he can add the i18n package etc. The main glibc package has everything included and that's the one installed by default in salix. It would only be a waste of space on the installation medium to include all other packages too. However in Slackware, it is often recommended (especially to new users) to do a "full" installation, which will result in *every* package being installed.
If you look, you will notice that there are similar cases with the openssl/openssl-solibs and seamonkey/seymonkey-solibs packages.
That's also the reason why dependencies should never be listed just as "glibc-solibs", but "glibc|glibc-solibs" instead, something that those slacky packages are obviously missing. Same for "openssl|openssl-solibs" or "seamonkey|seamonkey-solibs" ("|" means OR).
