Re: [OE-core] OpenEmbedded and musl-libc

[Thomas Petazzoni <thomas.petazzoni@free-electrons.com>]

Dear Paul Barker,

On Fri, 21 Mar 2014 14:37:16 +0000, Paul Barker wrote:
> On 21 March 2014 13:10, Burton, Ross <ross.burton@intel.com> wrote:
> > On 21 March 2014 12:34, Paul Barker <paul@paulbarker.me.uk> wrote:
> >> I'm currently very busy between various projects so I don't have time
> >> to hack together a musl-libc recipe myself but I should have time to
> >> help test it.
> >
> > I saw that yesterday too and thought it could be interesting for
> > Yocto.  I'm curious as to why it's better than uclibc though
> > (genuinely curious, I know little about uclibc beyond "it's smaller").
> >
> > Ross
> 
> Looking at what they say: Better standards compliance, different
> license, better for static linking, full UTF-8 support, strong
> fail-safe guarantees.

I would also add that musl is less configurable than uClibc. This might
be seen as a drawback (you have less possibilities of fine-tuning the
configuration) but also has a lot of advantages (it's easier for the
maintainers to test the code base, it's easier to know what feature set
musl provides, while with uClibc, each configuration provides a
different feature set, which can be a nightmare for build systems).

Another important thing is that the musl community is much more active
than the uClibc one. uClibc hasn't seen a stable release since a looong
time, and despite several calls on the mailing list since several months
to do a release, nothing is happening.

Thomas
-- 
Thomas Petazzoni, CTO, Free Electrons
Embedded Linux, Kernel and Android engineering
http://free-electrons.com