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Who controls glibc?

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Re: Who controls glibc?

#441

Post by alex_hitchins »

DoofusOfDeath wrote: post #436
alex_hitchins wrote: post #402

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is discouraged yes, but also it's human nature to want to understand why ones opinion isn't popular. I have seen previously my own posts be downvoted with no comments given and no clear idea of what I was doing to displease the hive mind.

I've come to accept the occasional downvote as noise in the process. It's probably not healthy to take them seriously.

Definitely. Agree with you on both points. Maybe I find it strange as commenting on your downvotes is shunned, but it's largely OK to downvote something without explanation. This is only HN after all and I'm very comfortable being different from the 'average-HN'er'.

Re: Who controls glibc?

#442

Post by eesmith »

wiz21c wrote: post #420
eesmith wrote: post #406

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been trying to figure out an answer which was more concrete than "I disagree", and ran into the problem that I can't figure out what "dictator" is supposed to mean, other than "person in authority whom I disagree with." I mean, people called Obama a dictator ( https://www.marketwatch.com/story/americans-newly-see-obama-... ), Jeremy Corby ( http://www.livetradingnews.com/jeremy-corbyn-turns-dictator-... ), a tea…

I think there is no other way to be a dictator (as long as he's appointed byt the board). Now what is a dictator to me ? A dictator is someone you can't disagree with. The dictator may be benevolent or not, may exercise his power or not, but in the end he's the one in power. And you can't disagree with him because you have much less power (he can fire you, he's got the money, he decides on what you work, you're the o…

Thank you for your clarification.

I found an example of a CEO who fired an at-will employee and as a result the company was successfully sued for breaking an oral contract where the board of directors had promised that the employee would not be fired for speaking about workplace problems. https://www.jacksonlewis.com/publication/south-carolina-jury...

That would be an example of where the CEO is not a dictator, yes?

In some states, a CEO cannot fire someone without just cause, or for reasons motivated by malice or made in bad faith. And there are civil rights, disability rights, etc. which also prevent certain CEO actions. But these can also be viewed as dictatorial government actions overriding dictatorial corporate actions. :)

That's why I brought up union representation and employee contract rights which prohibit the CEO from certain actions.

I think there are also cases where the CEO is unable to impose demands because certain key staff would ignore them or leave the job, or the CEO fears the public reaction should that happen. Eg, http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/UltimateJobSecuri... .

Re: Who controls glibc?

#443

Post by hacknat »

llukas wrote: post #280
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…

If there is business justification of joke in documentation then maintainer has no authority to say no. RMS is a CEO and he ultimately controls the project goals. If you think otherwise you fork.

They should. Glibc breaks its interface every few years. I’d love to see all the GNU tools migrate over to the Linux foundation, where they would be stable, safe, and free from autocracy.

Re: Who controls glibc?

#444

Post by sevensor »

oblio wrote: post #434
labster wrote: post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a hard time imagining the monarch insisting on a joke. Not just Queen Elizabeth, but any hereditary monarch from the modern age. Monarchs retain authority because they're good at politics... RMS, not so much. That's not to say his political positions are wrong, just that the man is impolitic at times. Monarchs exert soft power pretty much constantly, with public appearances, knighthoods, and recognition of gre…

> 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.

Re: Who controls glibc?

#445

Post by rurban »

cowsandmilk wrote: post #377
mycall wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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 and most data structures are getting useless also.

Where are utf8 strings? u8"" constants only is for nothing. Everybody needs an u8 api.

Where are the secure _s extensions? Pickering about callbacks and Microsoft is all they can do. But they rather add env hooks. __bos/alloc_size support is getting better, but gcc still cannot do proper usable const expressions in C. It's a nightmare.

You still cannot compare strings, even not with the crazy wchar_t strings (size 2 or 4), nobody uses anymore. wcscmp only compares buffers, but not strings according to the unicode rules. I believe strings would be pretty important to support, not?

What about a fast malloc? Not even ptmalloc3 went in, there's still stone-age ptmalloc2.

double-close leads to crashes, really? Similar to freopen with NULL.

This is your great community consensus. BSD or even musl are far ahead.

Re: Who controls glibc?

#446

Post by colde »

dec0dedab0de wrote: post #215
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…

It's a story because Stallman has played the "I'm the boss, you can't outvote me" card, not because anyone's in a tizzy over the politics. If you're going to pull the "I'm the boss, you can't outvote me" card, the best place to do it is somewhere trivial. Especially when you added it yourself a long time ago. Even though I would prefer some sort of vote for these things. there's no "political correctness" here at all…

I think there is a difference. Not so much because of political correctness, but because it is an inherently political joke.

Secondly, the joke is extremely US centric, and might make no sense to somebody now familiar on the US stance on abortion and its political impact.

I think it's misplaced for those reasons, and I am left-leaning and pro-choice. So while i agree with the political viewpoint in the joke, i don't think it should be in the software documentation.

That being said, i think easter eggs are fine, but this feels misplaced to me.

Re: Who controls glibc?

#447

Post by oblio »

Kind of late to the party: IMHO Stallman should not be the main decision point for GNU, as it stands. He should be in charge of an NGO which tries to raise awareness about Free Software, but he should not be involved in the day-to-day management of software projects, and definitely not ones with such huge visibility as GCC, Emacs, bash, etc.

Why not? GCC vs EGCS, Emacs vs XEmacs, etc. He has had a ton of huge contributions to the software world, but ask yourself this question: in today's networked world, where internet is widespread and cheap, where it is easy to organize software projects online and Open Source is quite well established, do you think that Richard Stallman would have the same visibility as he has now, as a sort of historical figure?

Also, before you answer, remember the FSF/GNU/Stallman were not the only authors of Open Source back in the day so even without him we'd have Open Source Software (MIT, Berkeley, etc.).

Re: Who controls glibc?

#448

Post by manangatangy »

FundThrowaway wrote: post #360

When did HN get so political? In the last couple of months I've noticed an increasing amount of argumentative political discussion. Both sides seem so convinced of their moral superiority, it was somewhat amusing at first but now I'm tired of it. I thought this was one of the last places I could come to get away from it but not anymore.

100% agree

Re: Who controls glibc?

#449

Post by stronglikedan »

jonhendry18 wrote: post #201
roenxi wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> a little humor can make it much less laborious

Here, here!

I would even go so far as to say that Why's (Poignant) Guide to Ruby directly contributed a great deal to Ruby's popularity because of the witty content alone.

Re: Who controls glibc?

#450

Post by scott_s »

eesmith wrote: post #442
wiz21c wrote: post #420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there is no other way to be a dictator (as long as he's appointed byt the board). Now what is a dictator to me ? A dictator is someone you can't disagree with. The dictator may be benevolent or not, may exercise his power or not, but in the end he's the one in power. And you can't disagree with him because you have much less power (he can fire you, he's got the money, he decides on what you work, you're the o…

Thank you for your clarification. I found an example of a CEO who fired an at-will employee and as a result the company was successfully sued for breaking an oral contract where the board of directors had promised that the employee would not be fired for speaking about workplace problems. https://www.jacksonlewis.com/publication/south-carolina-jury... That would be an example of where the CEO is not a dictator, yes?…

I think it's important to distinguish between limitations on power imposed after the fact, and limitations on power that prevent one from exercising their power. CEOs are not dictators in that they answer to a board, shareholders and, ultimately, the law. But those limits tend not to prevent CEOs from exercising their power, but are rather consequences of exercising their power. On a particular day, when CEOs say something should be done (such as firing a particular person or saying something publicly) it tends to happen.

Whether or not we call a CEO a "dictator" is perhaps a distraction - although I think the word usually fits in the colloquial way people tend to use it. The important thing, I think, is the recognition that CEOs orders tend to be followed, sometimes even against the desires of people executing those orders. The controls placed on CEO's power tend to be consequences rather than immediate limitations.

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