[Buildroot] [PATCH 4/4] systemd: uclibc now has posix_fallocate()

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

Thomas, Shawn,

On Mon, 9 Dec 2013 09:27:48 +0100, Thomas De Schampheleire wrote:

> This clearly requires a toolchain with a sufficiently recent uClibc.
> I'm not familiar with our strategy here, so I'm adding ThomasP to this
> thread...

My current strategy is to finish reviewing the eudev/systemd patches
from Eric, and get them merged. They upgrade systemd, and make it
depend on glibc, since it uses many glibc-isms.

If people are unhappy with systemd being only available on uclibc
systems, then they should either:

 1/ Improve uClibc so that it provides the necessary glibc-isms, and
 make sure that the uClibc project is sufficiently alive to provide
 releases at a decent frequency (which it has failed to do for the last
 few years). I personally consider the uClibc project as mostly dead,
 and the best thing I'm wishing for this project is that a fork is
 made, with a more active and reactive community.

 2/ Convince systemd upstream to not use the problematic glibc-isms,
 but I wish them good luck, knowing how upstream considers any system
 that isn't Linux/glibc.

 3/ Realize that when you use systemd, you are already using heavy and
 fat dependencies (think D-Bus and Glib), and that therefore you can
 just as well afford the size of glibc.

In the mean time, if people want to fix systemd 44, then uClibc
compatibility patches should not be *removed* but instead *improved*.
For example, this posix_fallocate() patch should be replaced by a test
in configure.ac, that tests whether the C library does or does not
provide posix_fallocate(), and acts accordingly. That's the good way of
fixing the problem, because it would support both uClibc toolchains
that use official uClibc releases (and therefore don't provide
posix_fallocate()) and uClibc toolchains generated by Buildroot (that
provide posix_fallocate()).

Best regards,

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