[gentoo-dev] RFC: migration from uclibc to uclibc-ng

[Anthony G. Basile]

Hi everyone,

Most of you know that uclibc upstream is pretty much dead.  There hasn't
been a official release since 2012 and there hasn't been a commit to
their master branch for over a year.  The situation has become
impossible since important fixes really can't be backported without
layers of intermediated fixes being backported first.  This has lead to
a fork at http://uclibc-ng.org/ which is actively maintained and has all
of the fixes we need in the latest release.

Since I don't want to just give up on Gentoo + uclibc, I'm going to
migrate to uclibc-ng.  (Parenthetically let me add that I think the real
future of embedded will be musl, but still I don't want to just give up
on uclibc.)

After migrating, I will pretty much abandon uclibc itself and continue
exclusively with uclibc-ng.  The supported arches are and will continue
to be amd64, armv7a (hard/soft float), mips32r2 (big endian), mipsel3
(little endian), ppc and i686.  The process will be as follows:

1. Build experimental stage3's with customize /etc/portage.  This is
just for testing since the final stage3's should not have anything in
/etc/portage.  This must be completed for all arches before the next step.

2. Migrate the customized /etc/portage to profiles/default/linux/uclibc
for all arches, and switch the priority in virtual/libc/libc-0.ebuild.
Currently it reads:

    elibc_uclibc? ( || ( sys-libs/uclibc sys-libs/uclibc-ng ) )


3. Update https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Project:Hardened_uClibc with
instructions on how to upgrade.

4. Start pushing out uclibc-ng base stages
https://www.gentoo.org/downloads/ for amd64 and i686.

I'm at step 1 for amd64 and i686.

I welcome comment on any of the above.

-- 
Anthony G. Basile, Ph.D.
Gentoo Linux Developer [Hardened]
E-Mail    : blueness@g.o
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