libutil in Debian

[Justin Hibbits]

On Tue, Jul 9, 2013 at 1:45 PM, Robert Millan <rmh at freebsd.org> wrote:

> 2013/7/9 Peter Wemm <peter at wemm.org>:
> > Create a symlink from libbsdutil.so -> libutil.so and libbsdutil.a ->
> > libutil.a and change nothing else, including keeping -lutil?  I'm not
> > entirely sure what that achieves, but it is harmless as far as I can
> > see and creates no run-time ABI issues.
>
> The problem is that right now, if we wanted to provide FreeBSD libutil
> in Debian we'd have to rename it. Of course we could just make up an
> arbitrary name and use that, but it would introduce a gratuitous
> divergence, and the reason we want libutil in first place is that we
> want to be more compatible with FreeBSD.
>
> --
> Robert Millan


What about importing the necessary functions into the glibc libutil for
Debian?  This way it stays as libutil, and if glibc imports the functions
to itself there's less to worry about.  If glibc's libutil started out life
as libbsdcompat, then I think it would be appropriate to merge as needed.

- Justin