a _REDIR_TIME64 macro is introduced, which the arch's alltypes.h is
expected to define, to control redirection of symbol names for
interfaces that involve time_t and derived types. this ensures that
object files will only be linked to libc interfaces matching the ABI
whose headers they were compiled against.
along with time32 compat shims, which will be introduced separately,
the redirection also makes it possible for a single libc (static or
shared) to be used with object files produced with either the old
(32-bit time_t) headers or the new ones after 64-bit time_t switchover
takes place. mixing of such object files (or shared libraries) in the
same program will also be possible, but must be done with care; ABI
between libc and a consumer of the libc interfaces is guaranteed to
match by the the symbol name redirection, but pairwise ABI between
consumers of libc that define interfaces between each other in terms
of time_t is not guaranteed to match.
this change adds a dependency on an additional "GNU C" feature to the
public headers for existing 32-bit archs, which is generally
undesirable; however, the feature is one which glibc has depended on
for a long time, and thus which any viable alternative compiler is
going to need to provide. 64-bit archs are not affected, nor will
future 32-bit archs be, regardless of whether they are "new" on the
kernel side (e.g. riscv32) or just newly-added (e.g. a new sparc or
xtensa port). the same applies to newly-added ABIs for existing
machine-level archs.
as a result of commit ab8f6a6e42, this
definition is now equivalent to the actual "default profile" which
appears immediately below in features.h, and which defines both
_BSD_SOURCE and _XOPEN_SOURCE.
the intent of providing a _DEFAULT_SOURCE, which glibc also now
provides, is to give applications a way to "get back" the default
feature profile when it was lost either by compiler flags that inhibit
it (such as -std=c99) or by library-provided predefined macros (such
as -D_POSIX_C_SOURCE=200809L) which may inhibit exposure of features
that were otherwise visible by default and which the application may
need. without _DEFAULT_SOURCE, the application had encode knowledge of
a particular libc's defaults, and such knowledge was fragile and
subject to bitrot.
eventually the names _GNU_SOURCE and _BSD_SOURCE should be phased out
in favor of the more-descriptive and more-accurate _ALL_SOURCE and
_DEFAULT_SOURCE, leaving the old names as aliases but using the new
ones internally. however this is a more invasive change that would
require extensive regression testing, so it is deferred.
the old behavior of exposing nothing except plain ISO C can be
obtained by defining __STRICT_ANSI__ or using a compiler option (such
as -std=c99) that predefines it. the new default featureset is POSIX
with XSI plus _BSD_SOURCE. any explicit feature test macros will
inhibit the default.
installation docs have also been updated to reflect this change.
Rich Felker
Quentin Rameau