Bug#896019: libglib2.0-0: undefined symbol g_date_copy breaking many programs

[Simon McVittie]

Control: tags -1 + moreinfo unreproducible

On Mon, 23 Apr 2018 at 13:02:26 +0200, Vincent Lefevre wrote:
> On 2018-04-18 14:43:47 -0400, rektide de la faye wrote:
> > I recently updated a number of packages on my Debian/testing laptop,
> > via aptitude and included in that upgrade to satisfy dependencies
> > was libglib-2.0-0.
...
> > nmcli: symbol lookup error: /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libgobject-2.0.so.0: undefined symbol: g_date_copy

Please try:

ls -il /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libglib-2.0.so*
ls -il /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libglib-2.0.so*
dpkg -S libglib-2.0.so

and send the results to this bug report.

It seems that in some upgrade scenarios, users still have old versions
of GLib libraries alongside the new versions. As a result of packaging
changes in 2.56.x, those old versions are now found in preference to
the newer versions (which are now in a different directory), and that
causes these symbol lookup errors. It isn't clear why those old versions
still persist, but only for a few users: they should have been cleaned
up while upgrading to newer versions, and if that didn't work, I'd expect
all users to see these failures.

<https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=894763> was another
instance of the same bug.

Is there anything unusual about this system that might have caused this?

    smcv