Title: Migration to sys-libs/uclibc-ng Author: Anthony G. Basile Content-Type: text/plain Posted: 2016-09-26 Revision: 1 News-Item-Format: 1.0 Display-If-Installed: sys-libs/uclibc Display-If-Profile: default/linux/uclibc/amd64 Display-If-Profile: hardened/linux/uclibc/amd64 Display-If-Profile: default/linux/uclibc/arm/armv7a Display-If-Profile: hardened/linux/uclibc/arm/armv7a Display-If-Profile: default/linux/uclibc/mips Display-If-Profile: hardened/linux/uclibc/mips Display-If-Profile: default/linux/uclibc/mips/mipsel Display-If-Profile: hardened/linux/uclibc/mips/mipsel Display-If-Profile: default/linux/uclibc/ppc Display-If-Profile: hardened/linux/uclibc/ppc Display-If-Profile: default/linux/uclibc/x86 Display-If-Profile: hardened/linux/uclibc/x86 Upstream development of uClibc has been stalled since July 2015 and there hasn't been a proper release since May 2012 [1]. New patches addressing important issues have been submitted but these have not been reviewed nor have they been committed to the master branch. Also, backporting even those patches which have been committed to master is now impractical as too many intermediate layers of patches conflict. For all intents and purposes, upstream uClibc is dead. Fortunately, a fork called uClibc-ng [2] was begun by Waldemar Brodkorb in February 2015 and is actively being maintained. Accordingly, Gentoo's Hardened uClibc project will be migrating to uClibc-ng as its libc provider. Currently stage3 tarballs based on sys-libs/uclibc-ng are available for all supported arches at [3] and these will become the default after October 5, 2016. Older stage3s based on sys-libs/uclibc will be removed. Unfortunately, migrating a production system from uclibc to uclibc-ng is not straightforward owing to the central role played by libc. A migration guide is provided at [4]. This has been tested on live systems with success, but the user is cautioned to plan a backup and recovery plan should something go wrong. Refs. [1] https://git.uclibc.org/uClibc/log/ [2] http://uclibc-ng.org/ [3] http://distfiles.gentoo.org/experimental/ [4] https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Project:Hardened_uClibc#Migration_to_uClibc-ng