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Re: [Patch] Adding fedfs to /etc/rpc
On Thu, 8 Mar 2012, Ulrich Drepper wrote:
> On Wed, Mar 7, 2012 at 07:42, Joseph S. Myers <joseph@codesourcery.com> wrote:
> > I think making libtirpc a build dependency is bad - in general circular
> > dependencies should be avoided where possible - as it makes bootstrapping
> > unduly hard.
>
> Some people goal to do everything themselves by bootstrapping an
> entire system cannot possibly be allowed to have any influence on the
> design. All that counts is the flexibility and robustness of the
> system.
In my view, flexibility and robustness includes build system flexibility
and robustness for a wide range of uses to which people wish to put glibc.
And it improves flexibility and robustness to have clean interfaces with
good support for building pieces separately rather than having circular
dependencies. That's not just about NSS modules and libtirpc; there are
several other ways in which I think it would be good to split up the
source tree and build.
Given the disagreements, we should clearly seek a wider range of opinions
to get a rough community consensus on the way to handle this. (Testing to
establish just what needs doing to make libtirpc ready for this purpose
would also be good; it's unfortunate we didn't do that before the sunrpc
code in glibc was deprecated, given subsequent findings that libtirpc is
still not really ready to replace all the deprecated functionality from
glibc.) Once there is a community consensus, that can then be followed in
subsequent development. Saying "cannot possibly be allowed to have any
influence" is clearly premature at this point and prejudges what the
community might decide; we need to see what conclusion is reached by the
public discussion among people thinking carefully about the issues. What
matters in the end is the community consensus at the point when libtirpc
is ready, and it seems known not to be ready yet.
> Not having an nss module like that in glibc causes problems as anyone
> who tried to use the ldap modules has seen. After every interface
> improvement it takes ages to (if ever) for those modules to adapt
> them. Take nss_mdns. Lennart a long time ago brought up that the
> gethost* interfaces should be different to better handle mdns. I made
> the change years ago and still the nss_mdns module doesn't use the new
> interface despite the authors being told about it.
You can have NSS modules that are maintained by the glibc developers, but
in a separate repository and released at the same time in separate
glibc-nss tarballs, built separately rather than as part of the glibc
build. That way glibc developers can update them as desired for new
interfaces, without having circular build dependencies. I think that
would address both our concerns.
--
Joseph S. Myers
joseph@codesourcery.com