Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Who controls glibc?

lwn.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

201–210 of 528 posts

Re: Who controls glibc?

#201

Post by jonhendry18 »

roenxi wrote: post #132
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…

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…

"Technical documentation isn't the place for a joke full stop"

This is a bad take. When wading through dry technical documentation a little humor can make it much less laborious.

As long as the humor doesn't result in ambiguity, there's no problem.

Something like "You can tune a filesystem, but you can't tune a fish." at the end of a manpage may elicit a chuckle but doesn't reduce understanding.

Re: Who controls glibc?

#202

Post by chris_wot »

smsm42 wrote: post #122
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.

This is harmless - probably true, nobody would die or suffer harm from having irrelevant content in the manual. We could splice full seven books of Harry Potter into it, and provided it is clearly marked up, it won't cause any serious harm. But glibc technical manuals are not exactly the place for RMS - or anybody else - to wage political advocacy campaigns, criticize US federal government or joke on the topics unrel…

I doubt anyone cares hugely about political messages in commit comments.

Re: Who controls glibc?

#203

Post by chris_wot »

jcranmer wrote: post #190
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.

One thing that may not be well-appreciated: This is walking very close to the line of outright political advocacy. If you read the entire email thread, one of the examples [1] clearly crosses that threshold. Once that threshold is crossed, it is illegal for a government employee to contribute to glibc in an official capacity, or even a private employee contracted by the government. This includes things like people wh…

Actually, GNU is a 501(c)(3) organisation. They can’t really be politically active and maintain such a status.

Re: Who controls glibc?

#204

Post by dralley »

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…

>The joke has meaning

Only if you're American and also have the requisite background knowledge to understand it, which many don't.

If you don't know the context, it's meaningless. Which is not a good thing to have in technical documentation.

Re: Who controls glibc?

#205

Post by geofft »

joshuamorton wrote: post #197
bjt2n3904 wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> there was no public crucifixion here, no court, no treason Yes, you're correct. In this instance, there was no crucifixion, because the CoC/inclusivity crowd didn't have enough political capital. See the NodeJS TSC drama I referenced. That's the "one side" being favored. That's the end result of pandering to people who take offense at the drop of the hat. This is simply Stallman refusing to concede to the notion th…

And being overruled by the people actually maintaining the project. In other words, you have the people actually writing the code saying something doesn't belong, and someone who isn't really involved in the project saying "no, we must keep this offensive thing". It's literally an outsider trying to force the actual maintainers to do something they disgaree with. But you appear to support the outsider.

That's also what happened with the Node.js stuff - it was outsiders trying to engineer a situation where the board's own rules would require them to push Ashley off the board.

The "SJWs" would have no power if we were not the people actually doing the work; if nothing else, in a year or two's time, we'd stop producing anything and users would jump ship. But it's the people who scream about "SJWs" who are generally outsiders who think that their use of a project entitles them to overrule the project's own maintainers.

Re: Who controls glibc?

#206

Post by ajross »

dralley wrote: post #204
ajross wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>The joke has meaning Only if you're American and also have the requisite background knowledge to understand it, which many don't. If you don't know the context, it's meaningless. Which is not a good thing to have in technical documentation.

> Only if [you...] have the requisite background knowledge to understand it, which many don't.

It's literally the C library reference manual. That's true of the whole thing!

The point is that it has meaning, however obscure, and reflects a particular principled intent of the author. And the request to remove it is cosmetic. And you resolve that by holding to the author's intent and not just polishing it to fit your sense of aesthetics.

Your argument would be an excellent reason to reject a submitted joke that didn't reflect a consensus of the active maintainers; not so much to remove one decades after the fact.

Re: Who controls glibc?

#207

Post by vbezhenar »

RIMR wrote: post #38
lsh wrote: post #28

To call it a joke is a bit of a stretch, more like a turn of phrase or wink to the reader. As far as explicitly inserting one's politics into communal tools, this case is so mild it's hard to fathom any grounded person wasting time on it. However, there is a case at the moment of the author of the BFG tool for git adding a paragraph of text about fighting trump at the end of his tool's output. He won't get rid of it…

Or, if you're going to be subtly political (as GNU often is), at least be current. That joke was 20-something years old. It ran its course. Also, as far as calling LGBT rainbows "political", I would have to disagree. You either view LBGT people as equal, or you can be a hateful person. There's no good reason to pander to the latter, but plenty of reasons to stand up in unity with the former. There are some concepts t…

I was raised in a country with very hateful views against LGBT. While I, personally, developed a tolerance against LGBT, a lot of people around me did not and those people often work as developers. Showing them any sign of LGBT propaganda is a great offence to them. I'm not lawyer, but I suspect that LGBT propaganda might even be against a law.

I guess, the same could be said about abortion jokes. Some people might take them too personal.

Re: Who controls glibc?

#208

Post by uryga »

modbait wrote: post #30
andmarios wrote: post #29

I am with RMS on this one. It is not an abortion joke, it is a censorship joke. He doesn't take a stance on abortion (a sensitive matter) but on whether they (FSF or a foreign NGO for example) are allowed to talk about abortion.

Indeed. The irony of censoring a censorship joke is probably lost on the censors.

This isn't censorship...

Re: Who controls glibc?

#209

Post by gpm »

MBCook wrote: post #36
zeth___ wrote: post #34

Fork if you don't like it. That's the whole point of free software. Edit: I find it disturbing that so many people want to erase hacker culture from the internet. Consensus is a Bay Area idea, one that came quite late to the world of computers, and one that many of us disagree with.

That’s the really odd thing in this situation. The maintainers all seem to want to remove it, and the project governance says the maintainers are supposed to decide based on the quorum. RMS just over ruled that. Because it was his joke and he felt like it. Which seems like it goes against the whole “community“ thing.

The maintainers don't own the project though, GNU (RMS) does. If the maintainers want to control the project they are maintaining it does seem that they need to fork it and continue under a new name.

(Or at least that's what I got from this thread. Certainly it's possible that GNU/RMS/Whoever originally had rights has passed those rights to the maintainers, but it doesn't happen simply by virtue of them maintaining it.)

Re: Who controls glibc?

#210

Post by jonhendry18 »

MBCook wrote: post #32
LeoPanthera wrote: post #11

Calling it an "abortion joke" is a politicized headline. It's a political/protest joke, maybe. Either way, the glibc documentation is not the ideal place for it.

It’s a political joke. About abortion. Seems fitting enough.

It's a political joke. About free speech. About abortion.
Post reply on HN