Re: [PATCH 3/9] posix: Allow glob to match dangling symlinks [BZ #866]

[Szabolcs Nagy <szabolcs dot nagy at arm dot com>]

On 13/09/17 13:22, Adhemerval Zanella wrote:
> On 13/09/2017 06:14, Paul Eggert wrote:
>> Adhemerval Zanella wrote:
>>> Another approach that does not involve adding compat symbols (which adds
>>> a lot of code complexity inside glibc build and do not solve 'make' builds
>>> against new glibc) would to make GLOB_ALTDIRFUNCS to follow the old semantic
>>> of using gl_stat instead of gl_lstat while making glob without GLOB_ALTDIRFUNCS
>>> works as intended.  And add another flag, GLOB_ALTDIRFUNCS2, which actually
>>> uses gl_lstat.
>>
>> Although that's clever, it is a gratuitous source-code incompatibility with BSD, which is not a good thing. To some extent it's just GLOB_FOLLOW and GLOB_NOFOLLOW in disguise, and disguise is not a good thing in APIs. So I think I still prefer the compat symbol approach.
>>
>> We'll get GNU 'Make' fixed, and I wouldn't worry overly much about people building unpatched 'Make' with new glibc. I filed a Make bug report is here:
>>
>> http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-make/2017-09/msg00014.html
> 
> Right, I am mainly trying to avoid bring more internal glob implementation
> complexity to glibc, but since you says the unpatched 'Make' built
> against newer glibc shouldn't be a problem I think we can this way.
> I will work on it.
> 

i think breaking make is a serious issue now for
anyone trying to do toolchain dev (in native chroots).
and if this gets into a released version of glibc
then it will be an issue for distros.

i think old make binaries should keep working with
glibc 2.27 whatever it takes and it's best to fix
this breakage sooner than later (it's a pain to
carry patched make around).

(this is not different than the stupid malloc hook
usage was in emacs and that was dragged out over
several years until glibc was fixed to wait for
a stable emacs release that is fixed, the same
should be done for make)