HEADS-UP: Planning on deprecating libc_r for 6.0

[Scott Long]

All,

Now that we've had working KSE for 2 years, I'm planning to declare that
libc_r will be deprecated in 6.0 and removed by or before 7.0.  That
means that libc_r will still be built and installed and usable for 6.0
and likely for most of the 6.x lifetime, but its visibility will
decrease in favor of libpthread and possibly libthr.  Given that 7.0 is
at least 2 years away, that should give plenty of time for migration and
testing.  I assume that libc_r will also live on in compatibility
library archives long after that for those with legacy apps.

One question that has come up is how to warn the user at runtime about
this deprecation.  Should the dynamic linker print a message to stderr
when it gets a request to load libc_r?  Should it go to the console
and/or syslog instead?  Should there be a way to disable these messages
so as not to break wrapper programs that might be confused by the
output?  Should we even bother at all with runtime warnings?

Thanks,

Scott