Good primary sources are the `glibc` documentation, especially the FAQ [1], and the `musl` docs, especially the "differences from glibc" section [2] and the FAQ [3], which is basically a long list of ways that `glibc`/`gnulib` developers have leaned into ever-more-broken/nonstandard behavior. If you dig through the GNU mailing lists (which is where I draw the line for an HN comments), you'll find megabytes of admission that this is in an effort to make "GNU/Linux" (or as I've taken to calling it, GNU "plus" Linux, Linux being merely the kernel...), to quote Fassbender as Steve Jobs: "Closed system! Completely incompatible with anything!"

But the short story is that both NSS (DNS lookup), and `iconv` (locale handling) don't work without `glibc`-specific dynamic linking shit. Ostensibly this is because of things like merely being able to read decades-obsolete multibyte character encodings, and not able to write them, is a bridge too far to support at all, let alone as a default. They've also got a bridge they'd like to sell you (see mailing lists).

It's just 90s Microsoft vendor lock-in: "embrace, extend, extinguish" we used to call it. Stallman was a hero for getting the free software movement rolling in the 80s. But in this business, you either die a hero or live long enough to become the villain, and Bill Gates himself would be proud.

[1] https://sourceware.org/glibc/wiki/FAQ [2] https://wiki.musl-libc.org/functional-differences-from-glibc... [3] https://wiki.musl-libc.org/faq.html