Re: [gentoo-dev] Add bc back to the stage3

[Richard Yao]

On 09/27/2014 07:39 PM, Anthony G. Basile wrote:
> On 09/27/14 18:46, Rich Freeman wrote:
>> On Sat, Sep 27, 2014 at 5:52 PM, Tom Wijsman <TomWij@g.o> wrote:
>>> What is really needed here is a vote by the Council on whether to add bc
>>> back to the stage3. If the people do insist, another vote regarding
>>> adding or changing an editor to stage3 could be done as well.
>>>
>> The call for agenda goes out on Tuesday, so if somebody wants a vote
>> please put it up.  Don't let mgorny be the only one with agenda items.
>> :)
>>
>> --
>> Rich
>>
> He isn't ... remember GLEP 64 :)
>
> And now for something completely different ... drum roll ... Really!  We
> have to have a council vote on whether bc goes into stage3?  If this
> does go to the council, then I want a pre-vote vote: should we bounce
> the decision back to the releng team?  We should not micro manage to
> this level.
>

May I suggest an alternative? We could implement sys-virtual/posix and
make it depend on all packages that are not necessary for @system, but
are necessary for proper POSIX compliance. Then we can tell users who
need/want an environment containing all tools specified by POSIX, such
as those not using sys-kernel/*-sources, to `emerge virtual/posix`.

That said, the larger matter of standards conformance that needs to be
considered. Illumos' Garrett D'amore has been working on standards
conformance tests for libc:

https://bitbucket.org/gdamore/illumos-gate/src/8815a50c9cc3f6f213931e12f72c252504363a82/usr/src/test/libc-tests/?at=core

Garrett told me yesterday that the changes necessary to run them on
Linux should be very small and are likely restricted to a few dozen
lines in 1 file. I want to try running them to catch POSIX conformance
issues in our base system. That will likely come later this year, as I
recently became aware of a SUS conformance issue in ZFS' implementation
of mmap() where PROT_WRITE + MAP_PRIVATE on a readonly file fails.
Fixing that will take priority over reviewing the standards conformance
of libc (others can review libc before i do if they wish).

I imagine that the tests will catch issues in our present conformance
when they are run. Once we have the results, we will need to decide how
proactive we intend to be about fixing them. We will definitely want to
work with upstream libcs to get issues that tests identified fixed.
However, there would be the question of whether we wish to fix them
immediately or wait for the patches fixing them to be upstreamed. If the
matter of adding bc to the base system for POSIX conformance goes to the
Council, it might be worth thinking about how far we wish to go for
standards conformance when further issues are identified.