Re: [gentoo-dev] News Item for uClibc-ng deprecation

[Sam James]

> On 17 Aug 2021, at 16:19, Joshua Kinard <kumba@g.o> wrote:
> [snip]
>
> According to the uClibc-ng website, 1.0.38 was released earlier this year
> (March 27th).  Was an announcement put out somewhere about the project not
> being maintained any further beyond that release, or has it gone quiet after
> that?

Upstream supporting something doesn't mean that's the case in Gentoo. The
last "proper" mention of deprecating uclibc in Gentoo was from blueness
in January this year [0].

Funnily enough: while digging for the email, I did notice you replied [1] and couldn't
build ncurses, which is pretty apt for illustrating the problems here. That is, no developers
within Gentoo are supporting uclibc, none of us are really surprised when common/core packages
break, and the tracker [2] at least is rotting (as are other uclibc-related bugs).

The gist is, it's not really supported anymore now. This is just about formally dropping
it. I'd be really surprised if anyone is able to use this day-to-day without a fair amount
of patches.

In terms of "alt libcs", musl has won that fight. Maybe if somebody wants to step in future,
we can look at uclibc-ng again, but I don't think we've got the resources right now.

[0] https://archives.gentoo.org/gentoo-dev/message/8b376050c51c7fa9a8a05246feb8c781
[1] https://archives.gentoo.org/gentoo-dev/message/258c08a43961269338e4c9238783f8fe
[2] https://bugs.gentoo.org/570544

>
> I haven't been able to base a MIPS environment on uclibc-ng since 2019 when
> Python3 in my stage3's mysteriously all started failing for unexplained
> reasons.  Thought about trying to bootstrap a new environment from scratch
> at some point, but just haven't gotten around to it.
>

That sounds like a good reason to dump it too ;)

best,
sam