Re: glibc 2.29: Reminder, only ~3 weeks to freeze!

[Joseph Myers <joseph at codesourcery dot com>]

On Sun, 16 Dec 2018, Albert ARIBAUD wrote:

> Last cycle, inclusion the Y2038 patches was postponed. I would like to
> get them in for this release. A first few of them have landed in
> already, I can repost the remainder of the series.

I don't think we can practically get consensus at this time of year on the 
trickier pieces, such as stat functions (cf. Florian's proposal; if we 
eliminate xstat, obviously the new functions with a stat64 variant using 
64-bit times would need to follow), functions involving futexes, or 
anything involving new kernel interfaces.  And obviously there is 
sufficient risk of architecture-specific issues that such changes can't go 
in during the freeze.  For anything using new kernel interfaces, if that 
involves introducing a dependency on new kernel headers to build glibc, 
that would also need to wait for an actual kernel *release* with the new 
features.  For anything involving new structure layouts, we need to be 
especially careful about working out the best choice of layout (should the 
stat64 variant be the same, on all architectures, as Linux uses on 
asm-generic 64-bit systems but with the high part of nanoseconds 
interpreted as padding, for example? - that's not something that will be 
decided by the kernel if the expectation is to use statx syscalls 
everywhere to get stat information with 64-bit times from the kernel).

So while I expect more changes related to more straightforward interfaces 
can go in before 2.29, I don't think we can add _TIME_BITS support or 
export any of the new interfaces from the shared libraries.

-- 
Joseph S. Myers
joseph@codesourcery.com