m4 doesn't work under WSL

[bobvanderlinden]

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]

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[bobvanderlinden]

This is quite old and WSL is superseded by WSL2, which works fine. 👍