Re: libc strategy
On Mon, Jul 02, 2001 at 04:30:46PM -0500, GT wrote:
> Quoting Will Yardley <william@hq.newdream.net>:
>
> Mostly what's been discussed in order to make this feasible is to
> either
> (a) port glibc to BSD, or
> (b) patch existing packages to work with BSD libc.
Or both, but obviously (b) first.
> But apparently porting glibc to BSD would be a major
> pain, and patching every existing package that doesn't work with
> glibc would also be a major pain. I'm wondering if a third option
> isn't possible:
> (c) create a new library that runs on top of BSD libc
> that simply takes glibc calls that aren't in BSD libc and provides
> them, or functions that operate differently would be "wrapped" by our
> glibc compatible version.
Such a library already exists in BSD, and need only be packaged for
Debian. In effect, (c) is just an implementation detail of (b) that
allows much of the porting effort to be shared among all the ported
packages. A person willing to put more work into a port might bypass
the compat library.
Actually, the BSD compat library even provides a degree of binary
compatibility, which we don't need. Much of it could be discarded.
> Is there a list
> somewhere of what the differences are between BSD libc and glibc, or
> is this one of those lists we'd end up compiling ourselves in the
> process of attempting to make this work?
Read the sources to the BSD compat library for such a list. I gather
that the NetBSD compat library interface is based on some old version
of Suse Linux.
Nathan Myers
ncm@cantrip.org
Reply to: