1.13.0 coreutils/id.c calls libc getgrouplist()

[Rob Landley]

On Saturday 15 November 2008 21:21:10 Denys Vlasenko wrote:
> No, it is not resolved. Be realistic. You just got a complaint
> from a user. Do you think he wrote this email just to annoy you?

Alan Cox once told me "a maintainer's job is to say no".

Yes, you have to _listen_ to every complaint, but it's a judgement call which 
ones to _act_ on.  If you try to make everybody happy, you wind up with gnu 
bloatware and _still_ up to your armpits in complaints.

> Very unlikely. People typically wrote such emails when they
> got bitten by a problem, and in this case it is a legitimate
> problem (busybox can't be built with older uclibc),
> not a user error or something.

No, busybox _can_, one specific applet can't.

Most things can't be built with versions of uClibc before 0.9.26.  Older 
versions of uClibc were _buggy_.  The problem with uClibc was that it wasn't 
having regular _releases_, a problem which should now (thankfully) be fixed.

Even _current_ versions of uClibc still have nasty bugs.  Build busybox tar 
against uClibc and then try to do "tar xvjfC filename.tbz dirname" and notice 
that it complains it can't find file "C".  That bug's been there in uClibc 
getopt for five years, and _still_ isn't fixed.

The relevant version of uClibc that fixes this problem is currently out, right 
now.  Another one should be along in what, 3 months?  (Ask bernhard how often 
he intends to schedule 'em.)  Supporting older versions of uClibc in newer 
versions of busybox is a path to madness, and I speak from experience here.  
(I can start listing things that were broken in 0.9.27 if you like.)

Rob