Glibc and the kernel user-space API

While I'm no software engineer it seems to be that there are inherent complexities and inefficiencies in trying to abstract away non-standard features and in preventing them from being used in the main body of code, to be relegated to a separate support library. You can't pervasively make full use of possibly useful features because you have to support more impoverished environments which might not have the feature, or might have the feature but with a highly incompatible API. If you try to use the local APIs of each OS then you may end up with a different implementation for each OS, wrapped in ifdefs.

I think there is a real debate that should happen to figure out where the best place is to draw the lines for cross platform compatibility. Should one use the OpenBSD model where there is a core project that takes full advantage of all the OpenBSD-only features along with a separate project for porting that to other systems. What about the rest of user space, of desktops, where should things be tied to the particular OS by using OS features and where should things be designed for the lowest common denominator, or where is it acceptable to provide multiple implementations with ifdef.