Re: PATCH: Add x32 dummy sysctl

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

> I disagree.
> 
> I think that glibc, of all places, must carry the burden.

There's just no good reason for that.

> There is a certain notion of consistency that must be kept across all
> ports, even new ports, to make it easy to build a large collection of
> userspace applications (see Chris' comments).

I understand that notion.  But it competes with another important
goal: get rid of cruft when we can.  Since sysctl is already
deprecated by the kernel, all code should stop using it ASAP.  For
existing machines, we have no choice but to keep the ABI we already
have.  (We could become more aggressive than what I've proposed so
far, and remove sysctl from the API while leaving it in the ABI.)
For new machines, we aren't forced to carry it and so there is just
no justification adequate for ABI bloat.


Thanks,
Roland