Hello, The uClibc project has not released any new version since almost two years, despite the fact that there are numerous known issues and limitations in 0.9.33.2, and a good set of fixes in the 0.9.33 branch that have never been part of any release.
This lack of stable releases is causing major issues for build systems such as Buildroot. Not only do we have to carry a large number of backported patches to fix uClibc bugs and add missing system calls and functionalities needed to run modern software, but we also have issues supporting uClibc toolchains provided by other parties (such as processor vendors), because they are not using the same set of backported patches. The lack of releases is causing fragmentation between the various uClibc versions, making uClibc more and more painful to support in Buildroot. To give you an idea, Buildroot currently has more than 50 patches on top of uClibc 0.9.33.2: http://git.buildroot.net/buildroot/tree/package/uclibc/0.9.33.2/ OpenEmbedded has to use a Git version of uClibc, with a few patches: https://github.com/openembedded/oe-core/blob/master/meta/recipes-core/uclibc/uclibc-git.inc OpenWRT also has a good number of patches: https://dev.openwrt.org/browser/trunk/toolchain/uClibc/patches-0.9.33.2 We have already asked for stable releases in September 2013 [1], then in November 2013 [2], and finally in December 2013 [3], and still no release has been made. Historically, Buildroot was created as a tool to generate small Linux systems based on uClibc, in order to test and exercise uClibc. Since its origin, Buildroot has had uClibc as its default C library, quite certainly helping in propagating uClibc in embedded Linux systems. However, due to the reasons mentioned above, supporting uClibc has proven to be more and more complicated. Therefore, at the latest Buildroot Developers Meeting, we discussed the idea of switching to using glibc as the default C library in Buildroot for the architectures that glibc supports. But before doing that, we would like to discuss this problem again with the uClibc community, and see if something can be done to revive the project in terms of delivering releases. Adopting a time-based release schedule has proven to work really well for Buildroot, and we believe this solution should be considered by the uClibc developers. Thanks! Thomas, on behalf of the Buildroot core developers: Peter Korsgaard, Yann E. Morin, Samuel Martin, Thomas De Schampheleire. [1] http://lists.uclibc.org/pipermail/uclibc/2013-September/047942.html [2] http://lists.uclibc.org/pipermail/uclibc/2013-November/048029.html [3] http://lists.uclibc.org/pipermail/uclibc/2013-December/048102.html -- Thomas Petazzoni, CTO, Free Electrons Embedded Linux, Kernel and Android engineering http://free-electrons.com _______________________________________________ uClibc mailing list uClibc@uclibc.org http://lists.busybox.net/mailman/listinfo/uclibc