Re: Nominations for Anthropic’s Claude for Open Source program

[Joseph Myers via Gdb <gdb@sourceware.org>]

On Mon, 15 Jun 2026, Adhemerval Zanella Netto wrote:

> The testing would aim to both improve libsupport (the support/ subfolder) by 
> consolidating internal functions (as LTP does for its testing) and add new 
> tests to cover missing symbols or functionality. We now have container support, 
> so we can extend testing for functionality that requires a more complex system 
> setup.
> 
> Also, check whether the tests can be improved in terms of coverage and/or time 
> spent. I started focusing on this area, and it culminated in a patchset to improve 
> test scalability [1]. One issue with this kind of work is that it requires a lot
> of GNU Make knowledge, but we do have many internal examples, especially new 
> tests, on how to improve coverage and write better tests. 

I once generated lists of untested symbols in glibc by extracting 
non-compat symbols exported by glibc's shared libraries and looking for 
those that don't appear as dynamic symbol references in any binary in the 
glibc build tree after the testsuite was run.  (This is a very weak 
definition of being untested, in that a single reference to a symbol in a 
test binary suffices to make it count as tested.  Also, in principle 
compat symbols should be tested as well; those are just lower priority and 
more cumbersome to test.)

> 3. Documentation
> 
> Document undocumented functions in the manual. The manual/ has 55 .texi files
> and a long tail of installed functions with no entry. Pick a small family (e.g. 
> some wcs*, mkostemp variants, newer C23 additions), write the texinfo. This 
> also has zero ABI risk, and is easy to review.

scripts/documented.sh is *extremely* outdated (see the linuxthreads 
reference) but might be a basis for generating a newer list of 
undocumented functions.  Note that a lot of undocumented functions have 
bugs open in Bugzilla, so when documenting something, look to see if there 
is a bug to close.

> 7. C23 conformance gaps 
> 
> The implementation of C23 is nearly complete, so the remaining work is mostly 
> conformance testing and coverage: cross-check against Joseph Myers's C23 status 
> tracker on libc-alpha, find the few stragglers, and write the missing conform/ 
> tests. Good intro to the standards machinery without needing to design new ABI.

Collin should have C23 support for conform/, but maybe it was based on 
what glibc supported at a particular time rather than on exactly what's in 
the standard.

-- 
Joseph S. Myers
josmyers@redhat.com