The Linux Ninja

Debian recently announced a switch from GLIBC to EGLIBC, the embedded optimized version of GLIBC. Aurelien’s blog post lists the reasons for switching as  (quoted from post):

• More friendly upstream (especially with regard to embedded architectures): “Encourage cooperation, communication, civility, and respect among developers” (as opposed to this).
• Stable branch with fixes for important bugs (a real one, not like the GLIBC one which is left unchanged).
• Better support for embedded architectures.
• Support for different shells (GLIBC only supports bash).
• Support for building with -Os.
• Configurable components (do we really need NIS or RPC support in debian-installer?).
• Better testsuite for optimized or biarch packages.

This is definitely a big change that I haven’t seen any other distributions make before and I wonder what this means for a popular Debian-based distribution such as Ubuntu?