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Who controls glibc?

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Re: Who controls glibc?

#291

Post by jlebar »

motohagiography wrote: post #136
geofft wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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.

I dunno, is it fair to call it an "agreement" if one side doesn't think they agreed to it?

zwol says:

> I don't think I did anything wrong procedurally. RMS may be the project leader, but he is not a glibc maintainer. His wishes regarding glibc are perhaps to be given _some_ more weight than those of any other individual, particularly when he is also the author of text under dispute, but we have never, to my knowledge, treated them as mandates.

Seems pretty clear he isn't party to this agreement, implicit or otherwise.

Re: Who controls glibc?

#292

Post by Steeeve »

This discussion has been a complete waste of time since its inception. Everyone with an opinion needs to go stand in the corner and think of better ways to spend their time.

Re: Who controls glibc?

#293

Post by lsh123 »

8_hours_ago wrote: post #120
RIMR wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with RMS's pro-choice opinion, but I honestly see no reason a 20-something year old joke about abortion needed to remain in the documentation. The consensus was that it be removed. It was removed. Just because HMS is a FOSS legend doesn't make him God.

> 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/

Fork, take maintainers and contributors with you, convince others to use your fork.

Re: Who controls glibc?

#294

Post by im3w1l »

quotemstr wrote: post #223
LinuxBender wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know of one distro that uses muslc [0] vs. glibc and they have a wrapper that allows most build tools to work (mostly) as expected. Are there any other options? [0] - https://www.musl-libc.org/faq.html

Last time I checked, musl didn't support random important things. Consider dlclose: unsupported due to an unfounded (IMHO) assertion that it's not possible to implement such a thing safely. Nevertheless, people _have_ been unloading shared libraries for decades, so musl asserting that it's impossible makes me question musl's other technical decisions.

There's a lot of not-safe-but-works-99.9%-of-the-time patterns out there that have been used for decades.

Re: Who controls glibc?

#295

Post by dragonwriter »

mycall wrote: post #253
ocdtrekkie wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Spot on. At the end of the day, nobody really cares about the joke, and nobody in the conversation indicated they actually were offended or upset by it, as far as I can tell. The joke will not be the downfall of glibc whether it stays or goes. But RMS' order may be. He just reminded everyone working on that project that their authority ends on any given issue wherever RMS' whims begin.

Lets think how many hours RMS has put into GNU over the years. That should count for something, no?

> Lets think how many hours RMS has put into GNU over the years. That should count for something, no?

In terms of personal respect, sure.

In terms of attention given to an argument, maybe, but that's also how you end up with a narrow bubble.

In terms of retaining a unclear joke designed as backhanded political advocacy on an issue that isn't central to the shared ideology that defines GNU in the technical documentation of a GNU project? I can't see it, no.

Re: Who controls glibc?

#296

Post by erik_seaberg »

peterwwillis wrote: post #221
chris_wot wrote: post #195

Though I can’t stand Ulrich Drepper, what he said in the glibc 2.2.4 release notes is true: “The morale of this is that people will hopefully realize what a control freak and raging manic Stallman is. Don't trust him. As soon as something isn't in line with his view he'll stab you in the back. NEVER voluntarily put a project you work on under the GNU umbrella since this means in Stallman's opinion that he has the rig…

This part has a morale, too, and it is almost the same: don't trust this person. Read the licenses carefully and rip out parts which give Stallman any possibility to influence your future. Phrases like [...] GNU Lesser General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2.1 of the License, or (at your option) any later version. just invites him to screw you when it pleases him. Rip out…

The legal landscape changes, if slowly. You have to decide up front who has the right to update the license, because otherwise with mixed copyright holders the answer is "nobody, ever".

Re: Who controls glibc?

#297

Post by ww520 »

djsumdog wrote: post #3

I am one of those people who subscribe to some of Stallman's crazier ideas, and one of those people who thinks trigger warnings are often misused[1]. That being said, I am really for professionalism in code and documentation. This might have been a fun joke for a pet project at one point in time, but I totally agree it should be removed. I really feel like Stallman is lacking some serious maturity here as well. It no…

Actually it has nothing to do with joke or professionalism, it's pure political power play through and through.

Re: Who controls glibc?

#298

Post by dragonwriter »

jsmthrowaway wrote: post #186
tptacek wrote: post #173

Lots of people seem to be rooting around like truffle hogs looking for the partisan politics embedded in this story, but you won't find any. The conflict happening here is between maintainers, who don't want a dated left-leaning joke embedded in the glibc documentation, and Stallman, who does. If there's "political correctness" involved, it's right-leaning. But, as a left-leaning pro-choice person: there's no "politi…

I’m much more concerned about him playing the “childbirth is far more traumatic than having an abortion” card in the discussion about the patch. Until this moment, I wasn’t even aware that was a card. It’s difficult to fathom the logic that would arrive at that statement making sense to someone typing it, particularly a person who will never experience the situations upon which he’s speaking conclusively. You’re righ…

> I’m much more concerned about him playing the “childbirth is far more traumatic than having an abortion” card in the discussion about the patch. Until this moment, I wasn’t even aware that was a card. It’s difficult to fathom the logic that would arrive at that statement making sense to someone typing it, particularly a person who will never experience the situations upon which he’s speaking conclusively.

It's a standard talking point in the pro-abortion (I am solidly pro-choice and I use pro-abortion deliberately here) crowd who feel the need not merely to negate but to invert everything the anti-abortion right argues.

Re: Who controls glibc?

#299

Post by maxlybbert »

GNU info pages have had a few jokes sprinkled around for long enough that I assume it has something to do with the environment at the MIT AI lab (e.g., https://www.gnu.org/software/libc/manual/html_node/strfry.ht... , https://www.gnu.org/software/libc/manual/html_node/Error-Cod... ). So I'm not surprised to see RMS push back on the change. I am surprised that he isn't effective at it.

glibc seems to be something that causes non-technical disputes every few years. I'm sure that's because it's central to almost everything but the kernel.

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