[RFC] glibc-2.14 and RPC

["Yann E. MORIN" <yann dot morin dot 1998 at anciens dot enib dot fr>]

Hello All!

The Sun RPC has been obsoleted in glibc-2.14: the SunRPC headers have been
removed. It is now recommended to use the TI-RPC (Transport Independent RPC)
library [1] [2].

'Obsoleted in glibc-2.14' means:
- programs can no longer be compiled, as headers are missing
- already compiled programs can still run, as the libraries are still
  packaged

What this means to crosstool-NG: basically, not much.

In fact, we can look at the big picture, and consider that the RPC are a
non-system feature, and thus need not be implemented by a system library.
It is the responsibility of the user to properly add TI-RPC to its
environment before compiling programs that require RPC. In this situation,
we should do nothing at all.

OTOH, the SunRPC has long been provided by the C library, and people got
used to that situation. A missing RPC lib no longer provided by the system
components might be seen as a big breakage. In this situation, we could
build TI-RPC as part of the toolchain build, for a finite transition period
(say 'n' days, n probably no bigger than 365.25).

But I still did not had  look at TI-RPC, and how nicely it plays with
cross-compilation, what its dependencies are, and well, all those issues
we will probably (!) encounter.

One thing to know is that TI-RPC is not a drop-in replacement for the glibc
version. At least, it now requires to link programs against -ltirpc. We
could try to mitigate this by providing appropriate symlinks, but is it
worth the effort?

So, what is your opinion on the subject?
- do not provide RPC as a system component,
or:
- transition with TI-RPC.

[1] http://nfsv4.bullopensource.org/doc/tirpc_rpcbind.php (seems old)
[2] http://sourceforge.net/projects/libtirpc/ (seems current)

Regards,
Yann E. MORIN.

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