Re: musl compatibility

[Pedro Alves]

On 06/07/2012 12:14 PM, Reuben Thomas wrote:

> Someone just wrote a rant in a bug report for a program I maintain
> about gnulib being the cause of many portability problems. I tracked
> it down to the points raised here:
> 
> http://www.etalabs.net/musl/faq.html
> 
> Have you any plans to address these problems? In particular, it does
> seem odd to place a burden on libc authors of porting gnulib to it,
> rather than just not supporting those functions which require
> non-standard APIs on such libc's.

I've heard such rants as well.  The rants are IMO, misdirected.  For instance,
IIRC, gnulib's freadahead use is caused by musl's printf not being posix
compliant, causing gnulib to pull in its printf replacement, which doesn't work
on musl.  A library that is new, actively maintained, and that calls itself
a "C/POSIX standard library" should really address that by making it's printf
posix compliant, so that gnulib's fallback doesn't even get built.  It seems 
that
nobody who is interested in musl has looked at gnulib's config.log to understand
why does gnulib think musl's printf is not good enough.

-- 
Pedro Alves