* Eduard Bloch: > I vaguelly remember that glibc keeps collecting workarounds for replaced > APIs all the time, adjusting binary compatibility with manually > redirected symbols. Glibc folks might correct me, though. > > So, wouldn't a restart of the i386 architecture under a different name > give an excelent opportunity to get rid of many of such workarounds?
Yes, that's what happens automatically once you start a new architecture for glibc, with a new ABI baseline. All the compat symbols before that baseline are automatically removed. But for one of the largest pieces with unwanted ABI exposure (the stdio implementation, also known as libio), we do not have a clean replacement. Part of the challenge is that even current gnulib pokes at stdio internals, so it's not just about maintaining compatibility with legacy binaries back when programmers didn't know you shouldn't do that (or simply had no way to influence development of the system libc).
