> The purpose of the function was to determine the minimum libc compatibility requirements of the executable.

For what it's worth, I didn't know this, the pip authors obviously didn't know this, and after rereading the docs just now I still can't quite tell that this was intended. I'm not sure why one would want these semantics either, but at a minimum it would help to document the intended semantics much more clearly.

> parsing needs to be kept around as fallback solution

The point of the data I attached was that AFAICT there don't exist any currently-in-use, non-glibc systems where "parsing" returns a meaningful result.