Re: [PATCH] make uselib configurable (was Re: uselib() & 2.6.X?)

[Christoph Hellwig <hch@infradead.org>]

On Wed, Jan 12, 2005 at 12:59:07AM +0100, Andries Brouwer wrote:
> s/sys_uselib/uselib/
> The system call is uselib().
> 
> Hmm - old cruft.. Why insult your users?
> I do not have source for Maple. And my xmaple binary works just fine.
> But it is a libc4 binary.
> 
> You mean "on the typical recently installed Linux system, with nothing
> but the usual Linux utilities".
> 
> People always claim that Linux is good in preserving binary compatibility.
> Don't know how true that was, but introducing such config options doesnt
> help.
> 
> Let me also mutter about something else.
> In principle configuration options are evil. Nobody wants fifty thousand
> configuration options. But I see them multiply like ioctls.
> There should be a significant gain in having a config option.
> 
> 
> Maybe some argue that there is a gain in security here. Perhaps.
> Or a gain in memory. It is negligible.
> I see mostly a loss.
> 
> There are more ancient system calls, like old_stat and oldolduname.
> Do we want separate options for each system call that is obsoleted?

Agreed to this complaint.  I still think it might be a good idea to
allow configuring obsolete syscalls out, but doing that on a per-syscall
basis sounds like a bad idea.  I always liked the way FreeBSD one
conditionals for everything that was obsoleted in a release.  So by setting
only few options you could select how old binaries you want to support,
defaulting to on for all of them.