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Who controls glibc?

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131–140 of 528 posts

Re: Who controls glibc?

#131

Never been a big fan of the "Code of Conduct" wars that seem to be going on. On the surface, yeah, it seems great. Everyone be nice and get along. But for some odd reason, the enforcement always tends to favor one side. Case in point, the pointless NodeJS TSC drama [1] from yesteryear. I don't like JS to begin with, but that makes me want to avoid the project like the plague. The problem with letting thin skinned peo…

Something more recent... CoC caused one of the top 5 LLVM developers to leave:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16980841

Unfortunately, this got censored heavily on HN.

Also, Rust-lang has CoC "cops": https://www.rust-lang.org/en-US/team.html (scroll down to "moderation team").

>Responsibility: helping uphold the code of conduct

That's pretty crazy!

Re: Who controls glibc?

#132
post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with RMS on this. People need to grow up. It's ok to be offended, but not ok to try and correct everyone just because you are offended. A line needs to be drawn somewhere and this is harmless.

Nobody who removed the joke said they were offended by it, they just said that they didn't believe it was the sort of thing that belonged in technical documentation. If anyone is offended, it is RMS, in the sense that he seems personally affronted that he doesn't carry the line-item veto power he thinks he had over all of GNU and people did not ask him before removing something he added 25 years ago. Not everyone who…

Technical documentation isn't the place for a joke full stop. Documentation is for people who are typically busy, uncertain and potentially dealing with something that is going wrong.

They want clear, concise and accessible help. They don't want or need tasteless jokes. It is disrespectful to their time to include random garbage.

This is supposed to be read by people who need it, not people who know what is going on and want to enjoy a good laugh.

Re: Who controls glibc?

#133
post #131

Never been a big fan of the "Code of Conduct" wars that seem to be going on. On the surface, yeah, it seems great. Everyone be nice and get along. But for some odd reason, the enforcement always tends to favor one side. Case in point, the pointless NodeJS TSC drama [1] from yesteryear. I don't like JS to begin with, but that makes me want to avoid the project like the plague. The problem with letting thin skinned peo…

Something more recent... CoC caused one of the top 5 LLVM developers to leave: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16980841 Unfortunately, this got censored heavily on HN. Also, Rust-lang has CoC "cops": https://www.rust-lang.org/en-US/team.html (scroll down to "moderation team"). > Responsibility: helping uphold the code of conduct That's pretty crazy!

I mean, I understand that. HN usually weights controversial things down to focus on the tech aspects. It keeps the place fun to browse.

This is something I'm particularly interested in, so it's a little frustrating that it lasted all of 20 minutes on the front page. Ah well.

Re: Who controls glibc?

#134

So what annoys me about this discussion is that both sides are not being very honest. Calling it an "abortion joke" is to me highly misleading. It's an "abortion law joke" & has nothing to do with the procedure of abortion! The people arguing against it seem to be implying its much more inappropriate than it is. Anyway, no where in the article is the actual "joke" mentioned. So I'd like to include it here just so peo…

This is absolutely an abortion joke, in that it's taking a function that has nothing to do with human reproduction at all and treating it as the same thing as having an abortion. The object of mockery of the joke itself is in fact law, not the act of abortion, but that doesn't really matter.

Re: Who controls glibc?

#135
post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> in which case I doubt that it would be because they were so distracted by a single word they couldn't focus on anything he's writing at all Well, you'd be wrong then. It's like people writing "Micro$oft". No I can't focus on anything you're writing after you use terms like that because I'm picturing an immature child. And why would I listen to an immature child's arguments? Put it this way, it's like giving a talk…

I don’t think RMS is trying to cater towards your needs, though. You’re perfectly capable of understanding him; it’s an (understandable) choice that you don’t put the effort into getting through the distractions. I don’t see anything wrong with expressing yourself in a preferred way, damn if it actually persuaded anyone. I mean, it’s the same deal with an open fly. You get out of that experience what you look for. Mo…

I think most readers assume these essays are meant to persuade. I have seen them advanced as "arguments", and RMS seems to act like he expects people to be persuaded by them. What makes you think these are closer to performance art?

Re: Who controls glibc?

#136
post #114

The discussion is a proxy for how executive decisions are made for glibc, and in particular by whom. The merit of a stale joke from the 90s is meaningless, and posturing about its appropriateness is disingenuous. Open source principals have always been eccentric (Torvalds, Raymond(!), etc.), and the FOSS community tolerated it not only because of their technical contributions, but because the open source community it…

This seems to ascribe a high amount of ill will to glibc maintainers who have been faithful and productive GNU maintainers for many years, and I don't believe there's any other evidence that they wish to undermine RMS' authority. However, if those maintainers find that their faithfulness is rewarded by being told that they don't actually maintain the project, they're just tending it while RMS is busy, it seems entire…

Except that perhaps RMS's approval and veto are no longer legitimate?

It's not ascribing ill will at all. They've stumbled on a canary or a "brown M&M," where regardless of how good they think they are, they've transgressed a boundary of the implicit agreement of who has final say.

They would have to be good and faithful to have contributions approved to glibc, so I would argue that's not the point. As the principals age, the question of succession and governance in key open source projects will become more explicit. Seems they walked into this one.

Re: Who controls glibc?

#137
post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> in which case I doubt that it would be because they were so distracted by a single word they couldn't focus on anything he's writing at all Well, you'd be wrong then. It's like people writing "Micro$oft". No I can't focus on anything you're writing after you use terms like that because I'm picturing an immature child. And why would I listen to an immature child's arguments? Put it this way, it's like giving a talk…

I don’t think RMS is trying to cater towards your needs, though. You’re perfectly capable of understanding him; it’s an (understandable) choice that you don’t put the effort into getting through the distractions. I don’t see anything wrong with expressing yourself in a preferred way, damn if it actually persuaded anyone. I mean, it’s the same deal with an open fly. You get out of that experience what you look for. Mo…

Nothing has to mean anything ever. You can read my comment as a comment meant to open a conversation with you and persuade you of a particular opinion, or you can read it as a piece of art, in which, whenever a disagreement arises, I can choose the easy way out by telling you "Yes but you see, you're meant to see past the things you don't like or disagree with".

My comment was meant as the former, and so were Stallman's. He has always tried to spread his word out and he seems to genuinely not understand why it doesn't take. Claiming his pieces are more art than work is revisionist at best.

Re: Who controls glibc?

#138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Just because RMS is a FOSS legend doesn't make him God. According to RMS he does have ultimate authority over all GNU packages, including Glibc: https://lwn.net/Articles/753661/

He probably owns some root certs. Likely if he were to start exercising such authority without being an active developer, there would be a fork soon enough. Isn't that what happened to emacs?

A few times, but so far GNU has held on.

Re: Who controls glibc?

#139
post #126
post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody who removed the joke said they were offended by it, they just said that they didn't believe it was the sort of thing that belonged in technical documentation. If anyone is offended, it is RMS, in the sense that he seems personally affronted that he doesn't carry the line-item veto power he thinks he had over all of GNU and people did not ask him before removing something he added 25 years ago. Not everyone who…

> they just said that they didn't believe it was the sort of thing that belonged in technical documentation I've been dreading the day OSS projects became as soulless and boring as corporate ones. If we can't have jokes in technical documentation then it seems that day has come. Next the FOSS HR department will be asking them to rename the abort function.

There's certainly something lost here, I won't deny that.

But glibc, and huge other parts of the FOSS ecosystem, has been a corporate project for years. Maintenance comes from stodgy companies like Red Hat who install glibc on the sort of extremely stodgy companies who are Red Hat customers.

And for those of us whose day jobs involve using glibc and reading its documentation, we deserve the benefits of free software as much as everyone else. If it is an ethical imperative (as RMS says!) for all software to be free and for proprietary software to die, it follows that the primary battleground is the servers of soulless, boring corporations. Your hobbyist laptop is important, too, because everyone deserves free software. But if free software weren't around, you would have installed a pirated copy of Windows with a keygen with some hentai as its background image and enjoyed the non-HR-compliance of the process, and Microsoft would have been quite okay with it because you would be locked into their proprietary software.

If free software is an ethical imperative - or even if it's not, but even if open source is simply a better way to develop software - then everyone who wants a job in software engineering and is qualified for it should be able to have a job in writing and maintaining FOSS. Human society has determined that if we want everyone to participate in an activity, things work better if everyone agrees to uphold a few norms. They don't have to be the same norms as boring corporations uphold (and you can quite easily argue that the norms of boring corporations aren't that good, actually, at making sure everyone is welcome to participate on equal terms). But the fact that we open our shared infrastructural work to accountability and public judgment is sort of how civilization works.

Hobbyist projects are still as possible as ever. Twenty years ago, you wouldn't have been able to get inappropriate jokes in the technical documentation for Solaris libc, or into MSDN, or whatever, but you could work on some upstart free software project with your friends and do whatever you want. You can still do that. If you want to be the young, upstart libc with some off-color political jokes that's being an alternative to the boring corporate libc, more power to you. Not everyone will participate, but that's what you want. Meanwhile, the libc whose goal in life was to displace the corporate libcs has won - and needs to step into its role.

Re: Who controls glibc?

#140
I could get behind keeping the joke in there, if it were actually funny. I object to it on grounds of joke-craftsmanship and economy. It wastes space being insufficiently funny. And by the way, it's not unfunny because it's about abortion; abortion, death, Nazis, murder, child molestation and other taboo topics are precisely the things we should laugh at. (If possible. Obviously don't do it around someone recently traumatized. But laughter is how humans cope and heal, so if you can laugh you know you've got whatever-it-is licked.)

As for Stallman's supposed authority: Anyone who believes in acquiescing to the wishes of a central authority obviously hasn't been listening to Richard Stallman.

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