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Who controls glibc?

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Re: Who controls glibc?

#481

Post by keiyakins »

pferde wrote: post #355
MrsRobot wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not the same thing. "spam" & "eggs" are very neutral. If they used politically charged terms, and inserted example code like "if brains(republicans) == 0 # always true!" then the situation would be similar. The difference is between neutral light-heartedness and non-neutral political message.

How do you know which words will and will not become politically charged in fourty years?

The same way you know what technical details will be needed in forty years: By actively maintaining the documentation, as they're doing.

Re: Who controls glibc?

#482

Post by tomtimtall »

motohagiography wrote: post #108

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…

Should they also faithfully maintain the pretense of every damn pointer he initiated? Their the ones doing the work of maintaining the project, removing no-value jokes in the documentation should not warrant this amount of weight throwing nomatter who put them there.

Re: Who controls glibc?

#483

Post by keiyakins »

zeveb wrote: post #469
majewsky wrote: post #414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Word. GNU texinfo is so fucking confusing that I only ever invoke it as info --subnodes -o - $PROGRAM | less That dumps the entire manual for $PROGRAM into `less`, where I can then use regex-searches like a normal humanbeing.

It's wonderful to use in emacs, and back before I started using emacs ISTR that pinfo was a great way to read info. I used to hate how GNU manpages would point me at the info docs, but honestly nowadays I prefer info. It really is nice — like a pre-CSS, pre-JavaScript HTML, only it can be beautifully typeset too.

Yeah, I hate info, but the problem is info(1), not the entire texinfo stack. The html output is pretty good and I already know how to navigate it, so I usually use that

Re: Who controls glibc?

#484

Post by keiyakins »

flukus wrote: post #126
geofft wrote: 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.

I think you're looking at the wrong axis. This isn't an order-vs-chaos question, it's one of constructive vs destructive. This particular joke makes the manual worse, not better, at being a manual. Cut it and move on, and always keep an eye out for places it could be improved, whether that be through better descriptive prose or a good, understanding-building joke.

Re: Who controls glibc?

#485

Post by keiyakins »

ajross wrote: post #193
bhhaskin wrote: post #97

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.

Yeah, this is one of those spots where RMS is stubbornly and stupidly standing up for principle in a context where the rest of us just clearly see that it shouldn't matter and he's just being a jerk. But... damn if he's not right about this. The joke has meaning. It still means what he meant when he wrote it. The issue is an important one (to RMS, at least). And no one else has a real argument here other than "it's u…

It's never helped anyone understand the technical material and it's caused at least one instance of confusion (https://stackoverflow.com/questions/48445031/why-would-it-be...), that's reason enough. Jokes in documentation are good, but only if they serve the documentation.

Re: Who controls glibc?

#486

Post by komali2 »

rurban wrote: post #319
komali2 wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree with RMS because I don't think the joke adds to my ability to understand the usage of the function.

Then you didn't read the fine line. He was making a subtle reference to power politics how to abort a process. Properly or abrupt. A certain fraction of the group wanted to forbid this abrupt termination and only go through signals, so that everyone involved can have their say and be informed. This particular function sidestepped it, and as such was politically loaded. Removing this reference would remove the questio…

The joke doesn't really make sense to non-Americans

Re: Who controls glibc?

#487

Post by PirateBay »

smsm42 wrote: post #332
PirateBay wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being uncompromising in your politics and values is hardly authoritarian. RMS runs the ship and these people knew it when they started working on a GNU project, especially since it's well known RMS has shot down things he didn't like before.

> Being uncompromising in your politics and values is hardly authoritarian In general, yes, but in this particular case it is clearly "I am the Law!" case - he's being authoritarian. And your next two sentences pretty much confirm that, even if you dismiss it with "they knew he was an authoritarian when they joined" and "he's been an authoritarian for a long time". Maybe true, but doesn't make it better.

I don't remember confirming his authoritarianism, I'm not sure why you think that's what I'm doing. If you think any exercise of rightful power is authoritarian than that's a childish definition and waters down what actual authoritarianism is.

Re: Who controls glibc?

#488

Post by komali2 »

zeth___ wrote: post #320
komali2 wrote: post #56

>Stallman, however, replied that "a GNU manual, like a course in history, is not meant to be a 'safe space'". He suggested the possibility of adding a trigger warning about functions that create child processes, since childbirth is "far more traumatic than having an abortion" "It is better to remain silent at the risk of being thought a fool, than to talk and remove all doubt of it." -Michael Scott

RMS is pro voluntary pedophilia: https://www.stallman.org/archives/2006-may-aug.html#05%20Jun... If you don't know what libertarian means you're going to have a bad time trying to apply liberal labels to people who were around the internet before tumblr.

Wonder why the above is being downvoted... verbatim from Stallman's website:

>I am skeptical of the claim that voluntarily pedophilia harms children. The arguments that it causes harm seem to be based on cases which aren't voluntary, which are then stretched by parents who are horrified by the idea that their little baby is maturing.

I guess context is needed here. Does he mean... like.. 16 year olds? Younger? Having sexual encounters with someone from their school that happens to be 18, or older adults?

Re: Who controls glibc?

#489

Post by da_chicken »

esrauch wrote: post #477
da_chicken wrote: post #423

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those arguments don't work. Just because a goal of the project is an inherently political one doesn't mean that any outcome or action even remotely political is inherently the goal of the project. That's an absurd hasty generalization. Further, just because one of the overall goals of the project is political doesn't mean that every goal of the project is political. That's a composition fallacy.

What arguments don't work? The truth is that FSF is primarily a political organization. It is more of a political organization than any other open source foundation, eg they do things like refuse to endorse any OS that distributes any piece of non-free (read: GPL) software. They advocate against non-GPL open source as harmful. They guide their projects to be technically worse if it supports the political mission. The…

> The truth is that FSF is primarily a political organization.

So what? That doesn't matter. What part of the FSF[0] or GNU[1] project suggests that abortion is an issue relevant to their mission or goals? Why is abortion a software freedom issue? How about we say RMS does adopt it. Does that benefit the other stated goals of the organizations? How?

What happens when the FSF runs a fund raiser, and they hear, "I'd love to give to your organization because I support free software ideals, but I can't because I disagree with your stance on abortion." Does that benefit free software? What happens when they're working with legislators on bills to re-enforce net neutrality, and the legislator says, "I'd love to help you on net neutrality, but I can't. My constituents are overwhelmingly pro-life, and I've gotten hundreds of voters contacting me since Fox News ran a piece on how your organization is pushing this bill to promote pro-choice laws. The National Right to Life and National Pro-Life Alliance have been calling to lobby against this bill as well. I'm sorry, but it seems that people think net neutrality is a pro-choice issue." Does that benefit free software?

So, is the FSF and GNU willing to sacrifice their software freedom goals in order to further pro-choice goals? Should they be?

0: https://www.fsf.org/about/ 1: https://www.gnu.org/gnu/manifesto.en.html

Re: Who controls glibc?

#490

Post by keiyakins »

hermitdev wrote: post #148
jcranmer wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The joke is confusing if you're not well-acquainted with US abortion politics, and, if you read the entire email thread, there were actually quite a few people who didn't get the joke properly (you can include myself in that list as another example). RMS's stance is quite galling here. First, he's making it very adamant that the entire purpose of the joke is political commentary. Second, he's resisting any mechanism…

Except, I don't think RMS intended this as a "joke". I honestly think he was dead serious, but worried that other people would interpret it as a joke and thus be inclined to remove it, hence his "do not remove" comment. Technical documentation and reference is really not the place for political commentary. It adds nothing and is distracting. Technical documentation should be just that: documentation; not political di…

If he was dead serious, he's an idiot. There was never any proposal to ban all usage of the word 'abort' in the sense of 'bring to a premature end because of a problem or fault' or as a noun meaning 'an act of aborting a flight, space mission, or other enterprise'.
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