Re: musl 0.9.9 released

[Isaac Dunham <idunham@lavabit.com>]

On Fri, 1 Feb 2013 02:10:53 -0500
Rich Felker <dalias@aerifal.cx> wrote:

> Hi all,
> 
> I'm pleased to announce the release of musl 0.9.9. In some ways it's
> less of a "big release" than I wanted while in other ways it's more.
> The biggest aspect of this release which isn't reflected in the blurb
> below is the record number of commits by persons other than myself,
> particularly nsz and John Spencer. I didn't realize how much was going
> to be new in this release until I sat down to write the change log and
> looked back at how much they'd done. Thanks!
> 

Glad to hear this. As usual, I've mirrored it at 
github.com/idunham/musl

On a semi-related topic: my development repository is currently broken due to 5 corrupted objects (I think I have backups, though), so I tried salvaging it and ended up going through all the working branches making diffs.
The patches implement these changes:

ABI: (much of this due to GregorR's patch)
Add stub for logwtmp, sigsetmask
Add getpt
Some aliases, including __xpg_strerror_r and e(uid)access
Add GNU error()
Add some BSD/GNU old math functions

Functionality:
Add vm86/vm86old
Add fgetgrent (for heirloom-pkgtools) (patch same as the last time I sent it)
Fix strverscmp (patch same as the last time I sent it)
WIP:
getifaddrs (I don't think this version will be useful, it's not netlink/IPv6 compatible)
res_querydomain (not tested)-for lshw

I'm expecting that much of the ABI stuff will not be desired, though it would be nice if the part for glibc-linked programs using correct C99/current POSIX functionality got merged.
It should probably move to #ifdef SHARED, though.
The vm86 stuff is something I'd like to see, for the sake of dosemu and some hardware utilities-this is something we'd need in order to replace klibc.
fgetgrent is low priority and small, but I'll be carrying it if it doesn't get merged. It will not go in a separate library, since it pokes at libc's internals.
I could switch some of the ABI stuff to a glibc compatability LD_PRELOAD library (libglibc.so.6 ?).

Rich, what would you like to see?

> I know we also have some pending patches from other contributors that
> didn't make it into this release, and some work of my own that's not
> ready to commit yet. I'm looking forward to taking care of these after
> the release, now that we have a bit more freedom to make bigger
> changes without worrying about breaking an impending release.
> 
> With that said, musl 0.9.9 features:
> 
>     Major compatibility improvements, including Linux-specific
>     features, GNU extension functions, grsec kernel quirks
>     compatibility, and workarounds for subtle but dangerous
>     portability errors in some programs. Size, performance, and
>     correctness improvements to the math library. Numerous low-impact
>     bugs fixed.
> 
>     http://www.musl-libc.org/releases/musl-0.9.9.tar.gz
> 
> There's a bunch of post-release agenda spread across several other
> threads on the mailing list which I won't try to summarize at the
> moment; let's just say there's lots of good stuff left to be done on
> musl in the next few release cycles leading towards a 1.0...

-- 
Isaac Dunham <idunham@lavabit.com>