[klibc] Polling again: switch the list over to subscriber-only?

[H. Peter Anvin]

Jeff Bailey wrote:
> The only question that comes to mind is the future of klibc. Is there 
> still potential for merging at some point?  In ubuntu we never got to 
> where we could do without glibc, and I'm curious how much push there is 
> still to finish this off and get it merged, or made more standard across 
> distros.
> 
> Beating around the bush I guess to ask if the project still has enough 
> value to keep around at all...

Well, I'm not going to give up on it quite yet, but I have to admit that 
the amount of effort I've spent on it for the last year has been limited.

I've had some discussions with some other kernel people about the 
potential for getting it to the point where it hopefully would be 
accepted, and there is a fair bit of interest in it.

The issue at hand is very simple: Linus doesn't want to merge klibc 
*only* for a kinit which does exactly the same thing that the existing 
code in the kernel does, even if it is a lot cleaner.  That code simply 
isn't ugly enough to be a thorn in his particular backside (some of the 
people who have had to clean it up, especially Al Viro, disagree, but 
that's somewhat irrelevant.)

So the objections aren't to klibc itself, but rather to what is 
currently available (from the kernel's perspective) on top of it.  There 
are a lot of ideas, but several of them are extremely hard to implement 
while still out of tree, which causes an ugly chicken-and-egg problem.

	-hpa