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Date: Sat, 19 Jan 2013 01:18:43 -0500
From: Rich Felker <dalias@...ifal.cx>
To: musl@...ts.openwall.com
Subject: Release plans

Hi all,

Most of the changes originally planned for this release cycle are
still in limbo, but as sh4rm4 mentioned on irc, there have been over
100 commits since the last release, some of them pretty significant.
So I'd like to start thinking about release.

First, a few remaining things I have in-progress that I'd like to get
in before release:

1. The new posix_spawn/popen/system:

Using clone and the close-on-exec pipe trick. I don't like leaving
in-place the current code which is dangerously broken under strace due
to bugs in strace; even if strace were fixed, buggy versions would
remain in wide use. The new code has been partially written outside
musl; it just needs to be finished and integrated.

2. Custom thread stacks:

Right now, huge TLS occupies part of the caller-provided stack space
(pthread_attr_setstack); it could even overflow the provided space.
The caller has no way to be aware of or work around this situation. I
have a new design in mind where the usual case will be to allocate new
storage for TLS, thread descriptor, and POSIX TSD even when a
caller-provided stack is used; the caller-provided stack would only be
used for TLS if the total space needed for TLS and implementation
overhead is less than 4k and less than 1/16 the caller-provided stack
size. (These numbers could be tweaked; they were chosen under the
assumption that it would be foolish to provide a stack that's only
larger than it absolutely needs to be by an absolutely or relatively
tiny margin.)

I have not started work on this change, but the final patch will be
about 15 lines. All the work is in checking that it's correct.

3. The wchar_t min/max issue:

See the forwarded email from the glibc list. I believe we have correct
definitions already in the bits headers, but it would be a lot cleaner
to drop them and use the portable definitions proposed for glibc,
which would always/automatically be right for any arch.

The remaining agenda items from the previous thread about this release
cycle are:

- strverscmp
- zoneinfo
- inet_makeaddr
- scanf %m modifier
- getifaddrs
- cpuset/affinity interfaces
- ether.h interfaces

Of those, strverscmp (based on previous discussion and drafts),
inet_makeaddr (trivial), and getifaddrs (based on legacy ioctl
interface for ipv4 and /proc/net/if_inet6 for ipv6; strace busybox
ifconfig for details) would be nice projects anyone looking to
contribute could work on without having to touch any musl internals.
Release is probably still far enough off now that work started on any
of these right away could make it into the next release.

Rich

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