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Who controls glibc?

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Re: Who controls glibc?

#521

Post by rurban »

SEJeff wrote: post #459
rurban wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He might not be the maintainer, but he is the BDFL. It's about respect. See what happened to Drepper who violated his respect. I like the joke, and I sympathize with RMS to let it in. In any case he opposed it so there is now a power struggle about the control of his project. I would love to see a better maintained glibc btw. Too much politics, not enough competence.

Well see what Drepper did. CTRL-f for "Stallman" in these glibc release notes: https://sourceware.org/ml/libc-announce/2001/msg00000.html While I agree with Ulrich, it is pretty brutal.

Yes, that was what I was referring to. It backfired big time.

See what Drepper is doing now: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ulrichdrepper He went from Technical Director at Redhat (i.e. glibc maintainer), to VP at Goldman Sachs (i.e. booted and being called an asshole), and now he is Engineer at Redhat.

Re: Who controls glibc?

#522

Post by geofft »

dang wrote: post #518
geofft wrote: post #391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure how any of this supports the point you're making (I believe the point you're making is "mentioning a traumatic event is as bad as causing the traumatic event" and/or "[these people are] authoritarians who want to remove all wrong think from the world"). If the point you're making is "I don't believe the concept of LGBTQIA+ and allies should exist," then yes, there would appear to be authoritarians who wa…

Can you please avoid this sort of low-quality tit-for-tat discussion? It's not what this site is for, and goes on forever if you feed it. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Yes - my apologies, I'll disengage faster in the future.

Re: Who controls glibc?

#523

Post by kamaal »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #200
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…

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.

>>He just reminded everyone working on that project that their authority ends on any given issue wherever RMS' whims begin.

The tech world is still largely based on prime movers. May be that will stay like that forever in engineering disciplines.

People who make it rain, call the shots. This includes their political positions too. I'm not sure why this is so surprising to people.

Re: Who controls glibc?

#524

Post by rurban »

rurban wrote: post #520
2trill2spill wrote: post #503

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> (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.

My own benchmarks. The trick is SSE support. darwin/bsd has that builtin, esp. since darwin can guarantee that their chips do support SSE. Generic linux builds do not, and -march-native or switching to sse optimized shared libs is rarely used. But recently also bos and align_size support got better in other libc's, which do use clang and not gcc. gcc sucks big time with those optimizations. freebsd and darwin all use…

oops: s,align_size,alloc_size,

The size of dynamically allocated malloc'ed structures, not just constants. The majority of pointers have an alloc_size, but no object_size (i.e. bos: __builtin_object_size).

Re: Who controls glibc?

#525

Post by marcan_42 »

rurban wrote: post #520
2trill2spill wrote: post #503

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> (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.

My own benchmarks. The trick is SSE support. darwin/bsd has that builtin, esp. since darwin can guarantee that their chips do support SSE. Generic linux builds do not, and -march-native or switching to sse optimized shared libs is rarely used. But recently also bos and align_size support got better in other libc's, which do use clang and not gcc. gcc sucks big time with those optimizations. freebsd and darwin all use…

Every 64-bit OS can guarantee SSE2 support, because it's baked into the x86-64 spec. Every single 64-bit Linux build can and does use SSE2 (unless someone explicitly turned that off for no reason). If there are performance differences, it's not due to chip support and crippled builds for compatibility.

Re: Who controls glibc?

#526

Post by sverige »

SEJeff wrote: post #458
sverige wrote: post #429

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Roman office of dictator (which is the origin of the term) was elected with absolute power in order to deal with a crisis -- generally speaking, a major war, and that usually involving an invasion of Roman territory by hostile forces. The term of office was limited to one year, though dictators were sometimes re-elected.

Roman dictator terms were generally either 6 months or until the task they were appointed to complete was finished. The Senate was capable of extending this term or re-electing the dictator depending on the circumstances.

You are right, I was relying on memory.

Re: Who controls glibc?

#527

Post by jonhendry18 »

Buge wrote: post #353
jonhendry18 wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a political joke. About free speech. About abortion.

It kind of stretches the definition of free speech. Your speech would only be limited if you're taking US government funding. Is glibc taking US government funding? You could similarly say that 501c3 tax code is a limit of free speech because if you take tax deducted money, you cannot make political speech.

The abortion gag seems a bit different to me, because it could limit what a doctor could say to a patient, even if for medical reasons the patient actually needs an abortion.

Re: Who controls glibc?

#528

Post by pydumpsterfire »

ubernostrum wrote: post #165
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.

I wish I could make RMS, and you, and everyone who agrees with you, live in a sort of reverse-Kantian world, where whatever you advocate for as acceptable behavior when you do it becomes a universal law of conduct for other people to use when interacting with you. No matter how much of a "thick skin" you may think you have, I'd lay money that in a world which truly worked this way, you'd last under an hour before aba…

Ah, but aren't you pretty famous yourself for being just that?
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