Re: glibc at the Toolchains microconference at LPC 2019

[Florian Weimer <fweimer at redhat dot com>]

* Zack Weinberg:

> I specifically disagree with this.  The existence of these dedicated
> libraries does not mean that there is no need for a minimal wrapper in
> the C library.  In fact, providing a minimal wrapper in the C library
> would make the implementation of dedicated libraries easier, since
> they can concentrate on designing their higher-level API rather than
> wasting engineering effort on system call wrappers.  glibc has already
> done all of the low-level work necessary.

We would have to begin backporting syscall wrappers, though.  Otherwise
these libraries are blocked until a glibc upgrade, which may not happen
any time soon.

Maybe we can move well-established libraries into glibc eventually, but
that can have unpredictable results if those libraries did not use
symbol versioning from the start (so that their implementation
interposes a newer glibc implementation for the entire process).

But I don't know if this (no syscall wrappers except in glibc) works as
a default policy.

Thanks,
Florian