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you do NOT need to write all your programs together to make them work together.you do NOT need to write all your programs together to make them work together.Posted Jan 31, 2013 22:52 UTC (Thu) by khim (subscriber, #9252)In reply to: you do NOT need to write all your programs together to make them work together. by nix Parent article: Poettering: The Biggest Myths
Even among the toolchain-related projects, they have some different maintainers (though some in common), different governance structures, different mailing lists, different release schedules, different source trees and not much shared code infrastructure (the only bits I can think of shared between GNU toolchain components are libiberty and libbfd, though the latter is quite sizeable). This is true but I'm interaction with these people enough to notice that despite all that development happens in all these projects simultaneously. When you need to add, e.g. something like ifunc you need to change GLibC, binutils, and GCC in a lockstep - and this is done by the same people without regard to any other projects. To me it looks more like a large single project which is complicated by artificial division between glibc/binutils/gcc rather then three separate project: you still need to introduce changes in all these places but additionally you need to write code which will detect version skew and disable these features appropriately. The division lies at the different level: in GCC there are few layers (SSA, RTL, etc) and developers who work with different layers know less about other layers then "low-level GCC people" know about binutils and glibc!
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you do NOT need to write all your programs together to make them work together. Posted Feb 2, 2013 19:17 UTC (Sat) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
All you say there is true -- some changes must affect several layers at once. However, a lot of changes affect glibc and the kernel at once, too -- does that mean that glibc and the kernel are the same project? (Note that for quite a long time the founder and co-maintainer of glibc was also one of the maintainers for one of the nastiest parts of the core kernel, ptrace() and signal handling, so even the people-in-common rule is true!)
I don't think they're the same project -- and neither are the various toolchain projects the same project, anymore than gnulib is the same project as coreutils merely because changes to both often happen in synchrony. They are simply projects with *some* close coupling between them -- but even that coupling is optional (you can build GCC and perhaps even glibc with a binutils that doesn't support IFUNC, and nothing goes wrong).
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