Recently on the eglibc mailing list there has been a discussion about removing
the option groups. See: http://www.eglibc.org/archives/patches/msg01268.html
For folks who don't know what option-groups are, it's a patch that went into
eglibc a number of years ago that allows you to disable various components
(effectively altering the API) in order to shrink the size of glibc.
It was created as an attempt to get into glibc the same type of configuration
ability that uclibc has.
In OpenEmbedded Core, it is currently being used to enable the ability to shrink
the LibC footprint to a smaller size. The Yocto Project's Poky-tiny
distribution uses it as part of the mechanism to create a smaller filesystem.
I encourage you to read the original thread, and if it affects you, please speak
up. The following is my attempt at summarizing the thread.
Currently the maintainer(s) of eglibc are working on syncing up glibc and eglibc
to the point that there will no longer be a need for eglibc. (See
http://www.eglibc.org/archives/patches/msg01261.html)
EGlibc was originally developed to house various architecture ports and other
embedded friendly features were not allowed into glibc. The majority of the
differences between eglibc and glibc have disappeared, with only a few major
exceptions. One of which is the option-groups support. This item is taking a
significant amount of resources to keep up to date, and it's unclear as to the
number of users for this functionality.
The belief of the maintainers is that the days of truly small footprint systems,
where even 1 MB of storage was a large number are coming to an end. As such,
the time and effort to maintain the option groups is likely not worth the effort.
I expect that between OpenEmbedded and the Yocto Project, a large percentage of
the users would be represented in some way. But beyond that, I don't have any
idea as to how many people actually benefit from this technology.
During the discussion the results were that either assistance with maintaining
the option-groups is needed, or the feature will be deprecated and eventually
removed. The last part of the thread it was suggested that in eglibc 2.19 it
would be deprecated, and then removed in 2.20.
--Mark
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