[gentoo-soc] Week 4 Report for Musl support expansion to support GNOME desktop

[gentoo-soc] Week 4 Report for Musl support expansion to support GNOME desktop

[listout]

Hi folks, hope everyone is doing well.

Week 4 has ended, hence I'm here with my 4th weekly report. Nothing
notable to report though. I have been using my patched GNOME and MATE
desktop environments on musl profile as my daily driver for the past
week, and haven't noticed bugs or anomalies.

With significant parts of the GNOME and MATE patched I started working
on miscellaneous packages that were failing on musl. Mainly those
packages needed a patch to not include either the execinfo.h or error.h
headers and the function that comes with those headers. Some of notable
packages facing [now patched] are debugedit [1], google-perftools [2],
netcdf [3], geant [4], and last but not the least hpx [5]. I'm sure more
such packages are to come up and I'll keep on fixing them. But I'm
however not too happy with the way I'm fixing these issues, i.e.
checking if `__GLIBC__` is defined, another reason being unhappy with
this kind of patches are can't be upstreamed. There is better way of
going around these issue, one of them being using either configure.ac or
CMakeLists.txt to determine whether execinfo.h is available and set a
include header guard, which in turn can be used to either include or not
include those files.

I've talked with my mentor regarding if we can include libexecinfo for
musl as Void and Alpine Linus seems to providing it as a result these
patches are not required there. We do plan on taking further look at
this, just not for now, once we have completed a significant portion of
our proposal then we can focus on this particular issue.

However not everything is needs to be sad in this report, I've two good
news to share. I now have learned how to version bump a package. The
google-perftools package recently fixed an issue that would fix building
on musl. So instead of patching the current version, I decided to
version bump google-perftools ebuild to 2.10 from 2.9.1, and one of my
patches [6] landed upstream and merged. So going on forward we won't be
needed the patches for hpx [5]. So, yay! for that.

However, there are still things needed to be done from my end. Midterm
evaluations are coming up and I've got my fingers crossed about that.
The plan of *keeping track of bugs that might cause run time issues for
other libc* needs to be worked on, I've yet to create detailed
documentation of the bugs/issues that I came across, this was part of my
project proposal. I'm still trying to set up GRS, and I agree with
*blueness*, it's a lot of work. The plan on killing the ::musl needs to
be worked too.

So for the next few weeks, I'll work with my mentors to get at least one
of those aforementioned parts of my proposal done.

That will be it for this week's report. Signing off.

[1]: https://github.com/gentoo/gentoo/pull/26223
[2]: https://github.com/gentoo/gentoo/pull/26244
[3]: https://github.com/gentoo/gentoo/pull/26284
[4]: https://github.com/gentoo/gentoo/pull/26313
[5]: https://github.com/gentoo/gentoo/pull/26281
[6]: https://github.com/STEllAR-GROUP/hpx/pull/5947
--
Regards,
listout