question about sign of DFP interest

[Steve Summit]

I've belatedly discovered that I'm not at all the first person to
propose adding decimal floating point support to glibc.  It was
proposed by Dwayne McConnell all the way back in March of 2005,
and again by Ryan Arnold in November 2006, describing a project
that might have turned into libdfp.  And then Joseph Myers
brought up the question of libdfp integration in September 2019.

What's remarkable is that none of these three messages appears
to have generated a single followup.  I'm getting the impression
(just an observation; I don't want to sound like I'm complaining)
that there's very little interest in this topic.  So what I'm
wondering now is whether the lack of positive interest in DFP
indicates indifference, or actively negative interest.  (Besides
the three messages I mentioned above, I came across one other,
which I can't now relocate, I think it was from Ulrich Drepper,
arguing strenuously *against* adding native glibc support for
printf %Df and the like, although that was back before DFP was
officially in C23.)

So is there any sense that DFP support of some flavor definitely
does not belong in glibc?  Or are people just not interested in
the question?  (I suspect that if there are truly no interested
parties, it may be difficult to get anyone to review any
candidate DFP code, but I'll hold that concern for another day.)

The other philosophical question I have is, if there *is* any
desire to adopt DFP support, is there a sense that it would need
to be substantially complete on its first release, or could it
start out with a "minimally viable product", to be augmented and
improved over time?  (Full disclosure: I'm an incrementalist,
leaning towards the latter.)

I'm not looking for long answers to these questions, I know
everyone's busy with all sorts of other glibc work, but I'm
hoping to get *some* indication of the actual interest level
here.  Do people think it's worth working on this?  Or is it
basically a waste of time?  (Perhaps more information is needed.
I'm thinking of writing some kind of proposal document, which
would explain among other things why I think DFP support is a
good idea, and needn't be unduly expensive.)

					Steve Summit
					scs@eskimo.com