[oe] [OE-core] State of libcs in OE-Core glibc/uclibc/musl

[akuster808]

On 10/29/2015 08:42 AM, Khem Raj wrote:
> Hi All,
> 
> I would like to get everyone’s opinion on the libcs we maintain in OE-Core, as of now, we have
> 
> glibc + cross localedef + kconfig patches which are left overs from eglibc days
> uclibc - which is more of less unmaintained
> 
> Its a significant effort to keep forward porting the kconfig changes since it touches everywhere in glibc, (I do it in my local glibc tree)
> almost every week there is a commit in upstream glibc which breaks the kconfig patches, I know there are distribution profiles
> like poky-tiny which uses glibc in this capacity, and may be then their are other custom one’s made on top, I would like us to not carry major
> patches which almost makes our component a fork due to obvious maintenance cost. I think there is viable alternatives to tiny libcs in musl now.
> 
> I would like to make a proposal for 2.1 release where
> 
> 1. Drop kconfig support in glibc and we become inline with upstream

Inline with upstream make a lot of sence and will help make maintenance
simpler going forward.

> 2. Move musl support to OE-Core from meta-musl

I see no issue with this.

> 3. Drop uclibc or leave it in current broken state, I would like to pull it out into a layer in meta-openembedded and we can leave the core plumbing as it is in OE-Core
If its not being maintained, then drop by 2.1.

> 4. Poky-tiny switches to use musl

If Poky-tiny is meant to showcase the smallest of the small , then that
make sense.

- armin

> 
> may other disto’s have moved to using musl as system C library e.g. alpine linux, openwrt, and I am also deploying it in  real products
> its pretty mature and well maintained with very healthy community around it. Right now meta-musl is capable of building and running
> core-image-sato/core-image-weston for all supported Qemu arches in OE-Core, the amount of software it can build is no less than uclibc
> support in OE-Core.
> 
> if collectively we think, this is a good move then I can work on all of above items in early phases of 2.1 so we can settle any
> outstanding issues, due to the shuffle especially in poky-tiny
> 
> Thoughts ?
> 
> -Khem
> 
> 
>