Re: Planning for 2.18?

[Roland McGrath <roland at hack dot frob dot com>]

It would be nice if we could finally do the revamp of sysdeps selection.
I still have basically no plan whatsoever about the details, but the
status quo (especially after Implies-before/Implies-after) is a hazard
to maintenance and porting.

It seems a good time to start whittling away at the ports distinction.
As has been said before, it should be done only via whatever cleanups
are necessary to ensure that no generic files get machine-specific bits.
I suggest that arm migrate to the main tree first.  But I don't
particularly plan to work on this myself.

Also, not necessarily related to broader planning per se, my day job
will include in the coming months working on a new port to Native Client
(first arm and i686, later x86_64) done from scratch.  (There is an
existing x86-only port now in production use, which was done as a fork a
few years ago without my involvement--though I now have a hand in
maintaining it--and is unspeakable in a variety of ways.)  I'll do this
initially as a separate add-on port not in the repository, which is the
only appropriate thing until I get the GCC target support merged
upstream, and decide later whether it will stay that way or go into the
repository.  (Of course all my work will be available on public git
servers along the way, and will all be FSF-copyright.)  This was the
main motivation for my intermittent work over the last several months in
clearing the bit-rot for "stubby" configurations.  Since I intend to do
it only in "right" ways, it will motivate further generic cleanups: to
continue to excise creeping Linuxism; to clean up NPTL to support
non-Linux configurations with a futex mechanism; some of the sysdeps
selection stuff, since e.g. it's an x86 configuration that won't use
ldbl-96 (the target has long double==double); pure cross-testing; surely
others.


Thanks,
Roland