Unfortunately, the glibc maintainers, despite knowing the existence of the FreeBSD qsort_r(3) interface in 2004 and refused to add the same interface to glibc based on grounds of the lack of standardization and portability concerns, has decided it was a good idea to introduce their own qsort_r(3) interface in 2007 as a GNU extension with a slightly different and incompatible interface.
With the adoption of their interface as POSIX standard, let's switch to the same prototype, there is no need to remain incompatible.
C++ and C applications written for the historical FreeBSD interface get source level compatibility when building in C++ mode, or when building with a C compiler with C11 generics support, provided that the caller passes a fifth parameter of qsort_r() that exactly matches the historical FreeBSD comparator function pointer type and does not redefine the historical qsort_r(3) prototype in their source code.
Symbol versioning is used to keep old binaries working.