Re: Bug#534398: ITP: libposix -- unifed implementation of core functionality of all Unix systems
On Wed, Jun 24, 2009 at 9:34 AM, Guus Sliepen<guus@debian.org> wrote:
> On Wed, Jun 24, 2009 at 09:17:14AM -0400, Bryan Donlan wrote:
>
>> Is libposix complete enough to link against for real programs yet? If
>> not, why should it be included at this time?
>
> I agree that if the only thing that works at this moment is the simplest "Hello
> world" program, that it should not be packaged yet.
>
>> Moreover, can libposix and libc coexist in the same address space?
>
> What address space are you talking about? There is also dietlibc and uClibc,
> who can coexist with glibc. But applications can only link against one of them
> at the time of course.
I mean, if a program is using libposix, can it also link, for example,
libpng, which is built against the normal libc?
If libposix uses the brk() area for malloc this isn't possible, but if
it uses anonymous mmaps exclusively then it might be doable (of
course, one would need to be careful to free with the correct malloc
implementation).
>> If not, all of debian's existing libraries will be incompatible with it.
>> It seems like the sort of thing that you might want to build an entire
>> distro against, or a custom/development build against, but not just
>> some programs in a distro...
>
> Having a glibc replacement for just a few programs is not an argument in itself
> for not including this package. Perhaps I want to develop a program that needs
> to run in an embedded environment that I want to test? Then I'd like to have a
> libposix-dev package that I can use to build my own software with.
For embedded environments, one will generally want a cross-compiling
toolchain, not just a library. You can't use the libc headers in
/usr/include, or libc's crt*.o start routines, after all, and even
uclibc abandoned the approach of hacking a host toolchain into using
its libraries. And for an embedded environment, a lot of the time
you'll have a different architecture on the target than the host
anyway.
This is all moot if libposix is still too incomplete to be usable of course :)
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