Re: [musl] [PATCH v1] nftw: support FTW_ACTIONRETVAL extension

[Rich Felker <dalias@libc.org>]

On Fri, Sep 25, 2020 at 02:18:28AM -0700, Tony Ambardar wrote:
> Add the FTW_ACTIONRETVAL mode for walking file trees, a commonly used glibc
> extension. This updates the existing musl nftw/ftw code to support the new
> mode and include options e.g. to prune trees and skip tree siblings.
> 
> This patch is based on one originally submitted to musl's mailing list [1],
> which was reviewed with interest but received no follow-up. It has since
> been cleaned up, and tested on OpenWRT for building Linux's 'bpftool'
> utility (the primary tool for BPF introspection and manipulation).
> 
> Including this extension should also further reduce any need for fts(3)
> support.
> 
> [1] https://www.openwall.com/lists/musl/2018/12/16/1

This isn't a decision on your patch in itself, but the reason that was
not followed up on was that it became apparent that the point of the
whole series was just trying to add everything to musl that systemd
happened to be using.

In general, there's policy (that should be expanded upon and moved to
somewhere more visible!) on criteria for including or excluding
nonstandard functionality from musl. The best write-up of it I could
find is in:

https://www.openwall.com/lists/musl/2014/07/19/8

I'm pretty sure there's a more detailed version somewhere but I didn't
immediately find it.

Since we haven't encountered any other programs (see 2A) that needed
this extension, is there a reason you think it's particularly
important to have, vs just fixing bpftool not to need it?

Rich