Additional Update Guidelines for libc

As a reminder, these are guidelines. The version you update to might make some of these steps obsolete, so make sure you understand what they do and why they're necessary.

Steps

1. Replace the current source with the updated source

Follow step 1 in "General Steps", with some extra exceptions. In addition to keeping the CMakeLists.txt, also keep:

  • empty.c - This is needed as a dummy source file for libraries that are only built for certain configurations.
  • weak_reference.h - This is needed to provide a no-op macro that sometimes gets overridden or undefined in certain files
  • darling-scripts - This directory contains some scripts you'll need later on to generate some essential files
  • locale/locale - Contains locale information.

2. Create an initial update commit

Follow step 2 in "General Steps".

3. Update the CMakeLists.txt

Follow step 3 in "General Steps".

4. Review the Git history for the project

Follow step 4 in "General Steps".

The next step explains some of the modifications in place when this document was last updated.

5. Make source modifications if necessary

Follow step 5 in "General Steps".

As of Libc-1353.60.8, the following files need Darling-specific modifications:

  • gen/FreeBSD/opendir.c - Modified to not define _filldir when building the legacy variant of the library

    Otherwise, it causes duplicate symbol errors for the i386 build of libc because the noinode64 variant already defines it exactly the same way and both the noinode64 and legacy variants are included in the i386 build.

  • gen/FreeBSD/telldir.c - Modified to not define _fixtelldir when building the legacy variant of the library

    Same reason as the modification in gen/FreeBSD/opendir.c.

  • string/FreeBSD/strerror.c - Modified to not define __errstr and strerror_r when building the legacy variant of the library

    Without this modification, both the legacy and regular variants define the exact same functions (same name and functionality), causing duplicate symbol errors for the i386 build.

Remember that, as explained in steps 4 and 5 of "General Steps", some of these modifications may not be necessary for the version you're updating to, and some additional modifications may be necessary.

6. Generate some additional files

libc requires some additional files that are normally generated by the Xcode build for Apple's code. However, since we're not using Xcode, we need to generate these files separately.

The scripts you need to run are:

  • darling-scripts/generate-derived.sh - Generates the feature headers in derived for various platforms
  • darling-scripts/replace-libc-comments.sh - Finds headers with private libc-only code, copies them to a private header directory, and removes the private code from the originals (a.k.a. the public headers)

7. Build and test it

Follow step 6 in "General Steps".

8. Commit your final changes

Follow step 7 in "General Steps".