glibc version mismatches in CI

From: Jeff Trull (linmodemstudent_at_[hidden])
Date: 2024-08-27 17:10:29

Hi folks,

While reviewing the Modular Boost changes for Wave I noticed that our CI is
now failing - and we're not alone in this.
It looks like the version of glibc in some of the old Ubuntu containers,
which are required to compile against old versions of gcc,
is incompatible with the Node executable that runs actions/checkout_at_v2 (and
3 and 4). You might see errors like this:

/__e/node20/bin/node: /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libc.so.6: version
`GLIBC_2.28' not found (required by /__e/node20/bin/node)

The Github blog discusses the change here
<https://github.blog/changelog/2024-03-07-github-actions-all-actions-will-run-on-node20-instead-of-node16-by-default/>

At least one brave pioneer, Andrey Semashev, has made updates to make CI
green again in a handful of libraries, but I haven't seen
it discussed on the list. Is there a fix other than "rewrite using manual
checkout"?

I managed to implement the workaround described in the blog post by adding
these lines close to the top of ci.yml:

env:
  ACTIONS_ALLOW_USE_UNSECURE_NODE_VERSION: true

Though it seems unwise to rely on in the long run.

Best,
Jeff