This is the second time I’ve come across this issue, and since it seems I’d forgotten about it after the first time, I’m making a note here.

Context

I’m using nix, as installed by apt (on debian). And thunderbird1 is installed by nix, to get the daily release2.

I’m using using the external-editor-revived plugin so I can write emails in vim. The setup turns out to be a bit finicky with nix though.

Issue

After nix profile upgrade '.*' ing thunderbird, when I try to use the external editor, I get the following errors3 as some sort of floating X11 dialog/notification box:

gvim: /nix/store/…/libc.so.6: version ‘GLIBC_2.38’ not found (required by /nix/store/…-libcap-2.69-lib/lib/libcap.so.2).

gvim: /nix/store/…/libc.so.6: version ‘GLIBC_2.38’ not found (required by /nix/store/…-libtool-2.4.7-lib/lib/libltdl.so.7).

…

And the external editor doesn’t fire up.

My ldd --version on my host debian system shows glibc version 2.37.

Note that gvim is installed through apt, on the host system (the “optiplex780” which is actually a hp z2 mini g3). A similar error happens on the T130 when using konsole and vim, where konsole is installed with nix.

Resolution

I’m embarrassed to say I still can’t make heads or tails of how nix works, much as I’ve tried. So I don’t know exactly why some part of the process wants the host system to have what’s presumably the glibc version used to build thunderbird.

I hope eventually I’ll figure this one out, but the workaround I can live with for now is just to either

  1. not upgrade thunderbird too much (rollback if it uses a glibc version I don’t have yet)
  2. temporarily live w/o a working external-editor until the debian glibc version catches up (which is iirc what I did the last time this happened). And then 1.

  1. not my email client of choice, but I can’t use mutt with my university gmail, and I get html support this way ↩

  2. for absolutely no reason, especially considering the amount of plugins that are always losing version support, and issues like the one in this post ↩

  3. paraphrased from two different pictures of different thunderbird configurations/instances, so the libraries don’t match up, but you get the point. Actually these may be right, but I don’t guarantee it ↩