as a result of commit ab8f6a6e42, this
definition is now equivalent to the actual "default profile" which
appears immediately below in features.h, and which defines both
_BSD_SOURCE and _XOPEN_SOURCE.
the intent of providing a _DEFAULT_SOURCE, which glibc also now
provides, is to give applications a way to "get back" the default
feature profile when it was lost either by compiler flags that inhibit
it (such as -std=c99) or by library-provided predefined macros (such
as -D_POSIX_C_SOURCE=200809L) which may inhibit exposure of features
that were otherwise visible by default and which the application may
need. without _DEFAULT_SOURCE, the application had encode knowledge of
a particular libc's defaults, and such knowledge was fragile and
subject to bitrot.
eventually the names _GNU_SOURCE and _BSD_SOURCE should be phased out
in favor of the more-descriptive and more-accurate _ALL_SOURCE and
_DEFAULT_SOURCE, leaving the old names as aliases but using the new
ones internally. however this is a more invasive change that would
require extensive regression testing, so it is deferred.
the old behavior of exposing nothing except plain ISO C can be
obtained by defining __STRICT_ANSI__ or using a compiler option (such
as -std=c99) that predefines it. the new default featureset is POSIX
with XSI plus _BSD_SOURCE. any explicit feature test macros will
inhibit the default.
installation docs have also been updated to reflect this change.
Quentin Rameau
Rich Felker