R uses private function in libc (PR#9107)
In any case, as you can see, __libc_stack_end goes away completely by libc 2.3.6, and as noted in the follow-up I sent to this bug yesterday, the reasons one shouldn't use this symbol are quite clearly stated here: <http://www.mail-archive.com/debian-glibc at lists.debian.org/msg28253.html>
Only up to a point. We know that __libc_stack_end is not portable, but it is being used to do something that is impossible to do portably: check whether the C stack is about to overflow. Since there is no way to recover from a C stack overflow, being able to prevent it is valuable. Your fix disables this facility on all Linux systems, which may be appropriate for your systems but is clearly undesirable as a change to R. The real question is how to detect systems that do provide __libc_stack_end and whether there is another non-portable way to do the same thing on glibc versions that don't provide it. -thomas