Wow, Debian (and by extension Ubuntu) has been using eglibc for five years and I haven't noticed?
I even compiled new versions of gcc + glibc (and installed them into $HOME, to run new binaries on older installations). You think I should have noticed that there was no glibc on the host system to begin with. But actually, the only thing I noticed is that the glibc (and gcc) build system is a bit crazy, and that it definitely will benefit from a new project lead.