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Re: [PATCH v3] Implement strlcpy [BZ #178]


On Mon, Nov 09, 2015 at 12:59:25PM +0000, Joseph Myers wrote:
> On Sat, 7 Nov 2015, Rich Felker wrote:
> 
> > Anyway, in general, if adding a function to glibc is a bad idea,
> > adding it in its own separate .so file shipped with glibc is an even
> > worse idea. There are no advantages and lots of disadvantages.
> 
> While it's trivially true that "adding a function to glibc is a bad idea" 
> means it's bad to add it to any library in glibc, existing or new, there 
> may well be cases where the conclusion is "it's a good idea to add this 
> function to glibc, but in a new library (which might be might not be 
> linked in automatically via AS_NEEDED in a .so linker script)".  Cf. 
> libmvec or the libinux-syscalls.so.1 discussion.  It's just that I don't 
> see strlcpy, strlcat or explicit_bzero as such cases - I see them as cases 
> that belong in libc.

Could you elaborate on when/how there would ever be a technical (not
ideologically-motivated) reason to add additional .so's as part of
glibc? I see all the ones we have (esp. libpthread and librt) as
historical mistakes that have been a perpetual source of problems
(like programs sticking with the deprecated gettimeofday instead of
clock_gettime because the latter needed -lrt, and broken weak symbol
hacks for pthreads like gcc pr57740, pr60662, or libxml2 pr704904)
that we should aim to eliminate, not duplicate.

Rich


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