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Who controls glibc?

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Re: Who controls glibc?

#501

Post by throwajay87492 »

johannes1234321 wrote: post #111
readme wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Excellent idea! Just rename it political-libc for all the people who want politics mixed in with their C library.

The FSF and its GNU project are a political endeavor. For a less-political (non-political doesn't exist) libc one might fork into linux-libc or similar. (I'm not saying that's appropriate thing to do, as I'm just a lurker enjoying the free work by others in glibc's regard, but wanted to make the point)

These constant attempts to assert that "everything is political" are getting really old. All people have the capacity to be political. Nothing else is.

I wish I could understand who taught you people that insistence of stupid horseshit is the key to achieving your goals.

Re: Who controls glibc?

#502

Post by josefx »

danmg wrote: post #473
olliej wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

he's the one forcing it -- he's not an active member of libc anymore, he's not a maintainer, but he decided that his personal joke from 20 years ago absolutely must remain in the documentation because he's petty. He sounds like the one in need of a safe space where nothing ever changes

It's more like he's preventing bikeshedding by stopping them from making irrelevant non-technical decisions.

There was already a consens before he decided to contribute his own opinion to a triviality. By doing so he prolonged the discussion at least a bit. Forcing your opinion about a pointless and otherwise done issue on others seems like textbook bikeshedding to me.

At leaast now he can honestly say he is still actively involved with glibc.

Re: Who controls glibc?

#503

Post by 2trill2spill »

rurban wrote: post #445
cowsandmilk wrote: post #377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Glibc spent over a decade under Ulrich Drepper, who many viewed as a dictator. This resulted in forks and major linux distributions no longer using glibc. About 6 years ago, Drepper was removed and glibc moved to "cooperative community development"[0]. The community spoke and said they did not like dictators in development of glibc. Since Drepper's removal, many would agree that the quality of glibc has increased sig…

I beg to disagree. The quality post-Drepper certainly did not improve. Bugs are getting worse, needed features are still not implemented, needed performance improvements are sidelined (bsd libc still 20% faster with modern CPUs), crazy but useless ASM optimizations are being added, where e.g. proper loops written in C gain much more. Just not on gcc. Same as with stdlib++ btw, where strings are now uselessly bloated…

> (bsd libc still 20% faster with modern CPUs

You have a source for that? it wouldn't surprise me, GNU code tends to be more bloated than a similar BSD licensed project.

Re: Who controls glibc?

#504

Post by favorited »

jlv2 wrote: post #466
concrete-faucet wrote: post #404

If RMS thinks that dumb jokes in documentation are worth having, I say we wholeheartedly embrace it. For example: * GNU/Hurd - almost as traumatic as childbirth. or * childbirth - if it takes as long as it takes to write GNU/Hurd, may God have mercy on your soul. or * RMS - I know how to program computers (maybe), so obviously I am an expert on female reproductive issues.

My wife and I were at a garden party in the early 90s where RMS was at also. We were talking about various things and somehow the fact that my wife was pregnant with our first child came up. RMS started talking about how maybe people shouldn't just be allowed to have children. In particular, he brought up that some towns require people to have dog licenses before they can own a dog. He pondered that the government ma…

I remember him complaining when the maintainer of some GNU project (emacs maybe?) was stepping aside to focus on starting a family. Stallman was writing about how being the maintainer of emacs is more important than having children, so this guy was making the wrong move.

If that's his belief, that's fine – I personally don't plan on having children, so I suppose I could empathize with his view – but he came across as a total ass. It seemed inconceivable to him that other people have different priorities in life than he does.

Re: Who controls glibc?

#505

Post by esrauch »

da_chicken wrote: post #489
esrauch wrote: post #477

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 lo…

The issue at hand seems to be about suppression of information (information that happens to be about abortion), not pro-abortion.

Re: Who controls glibc?

#506

Post by compsciphd »

nialv7 wrote: post #430
mikekchar wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a big fan of RMS, but I've got to say "No". He's not a maintainer. He doesn't get a vote. If he wants to work his way back into that project, then I've got no problem with it. But he doesn't. It's like the CEO telling you that he wants a joke in the technical documentation for one of your libraries. They might get away with it because of their position, but it's an abuse of that position even if the CEO used to b…

Well, let's not forget that "CEO" wrote that technical documentation. And probably also wrote (at least an older version of) the code, too.

not quite true,

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_C_Library#History

Re: Who controls glibc?

#507

Post by p_l »

paulmd wrote: post #433
p_l wrote: post #424

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Considering the stories of the breakdown of MIT AI Lab, you might be... surprised. (No, Levy's book was not honest to the facts)

I don't know the context of this, explanation?

"Hackers: Heroes of the Computing Revolution" is probably the most common source for those who "weren't there" about AI Lab, and it paints a story of the lab being destroyed by Symbolics, proprietary software etc. - I have personally seen the meme of "AI Lab hackers got bought out" with referrals to the book itself.

What a lot of people don't know is that one of the descriptions used by RMS to talk about how "AI Lab lost people", the story of how he couldn't meet people at lunch, isn't because they left AI Lab for "evil corporations". It was because a lot of people avoided RMS, especially after lawsuit often considered more crucial for the creation of GNU than the Xerox printer story (Stallman violated Symbolics-MIT source licensing deal).

From better sources, I have met two AI Lab members from 1970s - one even claimed to have been RMS' supervisor back when RMS was Harvard Undergrad working part-time (and if certain war story is to be believed, is indirectly responsible for Emacs happening) - the impression left was that a lot of RMS' AI Lab contemporaries wouldn't shake hands with him since 1980s.

Heard also interesting stories on RMS' mismanagement of early Hurd initiative and how it resulted in close to 0 work being done.

Re: Who controls glibc?

#508

Post by sanxiyn »

2FC00C733A55 wrote: post #405
sanxiyn wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I want to defend Rust project here. You should realize that Rust CoC is scoped to official Rust project space. > They have a member on their core team who has advocated violence in the past. It's just that it's violence against white people so it's "OK". As far as I know, the member you are referring to never advocated violence in the official Rust project space. That's enough for Rust.

And you are sure that any code of conduct violations will not include anything out of the official Rust project space, like an unrelated twitter post?

Yes, I am 100% sure.

Re: Who controls glibc?

#509

Post by labster »

sevensor wrote: post #444
oblio wrote: post #434

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Monarchs [...] often end up as the most popular political figures of their republics. I can't quite put my finger on it, but I think there's something wrong with that statement :p

I'm going to... stick my neck out... and venture that republics have usually got rid of their monarchs.

Har har, yeah, point taken, but many constitutional monarchies are de facto republics. The UK, Sweden, the Netherlands, Japan, Norway. I was trying to distinguish from the hereditary monarchies that aren't republican, like the People's Democratic Republic of Korea.

Re: Who controls glibc?

#510

Post by knorker »

jonhendry18 wrote: post #216
RIMR wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't jump to the conclusion that the consensus is that the joke is disagreeable, but that it is not an appropriate joke for the documentation. I am a staunchly pro-choice, but this joke is out-of-date and out-of-place. I would personally vote for it to go. I really don't want to see the political divide fragment the GNU/Linux community because people are determined to inject their opinions into code. If you run…

"but this joke is out-of-date" It isn't out of date, it's entirely relevant today.

So is "US government supports governments committing atrocities on a daily basis. E.g. Saudi and Israel".

That doesn't mean that this political statement belongs in the manpage for "kill".

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