4 ms·
What an unexpected schism! > "As the head of the GNU Project, I am in charge of what we publish in GNU manuals. I decide the criteria to decide by, too" Inter
by wyldfire 9y ago
What an unexpected schism!
> "As the head of the GNU Project, I am in charge of what we publish in GNU manuals. I decide the criteria to decide by, too"
Interesting. Sounds decidedly authoritarian to cite (sole?) control of the content and criteria.
> "I exercise my authority over Glibc very rarely -- and when I have done so, I have talked with the official maintainers. So rarely that some of you thought that you are entirely autonomous."
That sounds puzzling. "It turns out my rank actually supersedes yours and always has, I've just never exercised it until now."
In general I've always thought that Stallman is to be admired. He's made a fantastic contribution to society. I don't really have a position on the issue at the heart of this manpage content debate, but on the meta-issue of what his role is/should be, his position seems like an odd one.
Ultimately, the copyright holders for the source code (and to some extent the manuals) have the real power regarding "who controls glibc?". I suspect that no one will care strongly enough about this particular issue in order to drive a real fork.
- LinuxBender 9y agoI know of one distro that uses muslc [0] vs. glibc and they have a wrapper that allows most build tools to work (mostly) as expected. Are there any other options? [0] - https://www.musl-libc.org/faq.html https://www.musl-libc.org/faq.html
- wyldfire 9y agoFor open source libc? musl, glibc, dietlibc, bionic are the only I know of. The supported targets vary widely among these, though.
- earenndil 9y agoThere is the freebsd libc; they run their own.
- rurban 9y agoWhich is in fact the most used, and arguably technically superior to glibc. freebsd -> darwin, openbsd, netbsd and dragonfly bsd. openbsd and netbsd like to add their own stuff on top of it also. The Open Watcom libc and bionic are also superior. bionic is getting better and better recently. musl is in some parts better, in some parts worse. Same for Embarcadero C++ libc. Worse than glibc are only: the two MS libc's, msvcrt and ulibc (which is getting on par), the wine libc, newlib (arguably with dietlibc the worst), uClibc, minilibc.
- earenndil 9y ago> Worse than glibc are only [lists as many libcs as are better than it] Perhaps glibc isn't that bad...
- rurban 9y agoOh it is. I've listed more quirks here, from the testsuite I've written for all libc's. https://rurban.github.io/safeclib/doc/safec-3.3/d1/dae/md_doc_libc-overview.html https://rurban.github.io/safeclib/doc/safec-3.3/d1/dae/md_do...
- quotemstr 9y agoLast time I checked, musl didn't support random important things. Consider dlclose: unsupported due to an unfounded (IMHO) assertion that it's not possible to implement such a thing safely. Nevertheless, people _have_ been unloading shared libraries for decades, so musl asserting that it's impossible makes me question musl's other technical decisions.
- im3w1l 9y agoThere's a lot of not-safe-but-works-99.9%-of-the-time patterns out there that have been used for decades.
- quotemstr 9y agoUnloading shared libraries is safe. If you insist that it's not, even though it actually works in a real, robust, not probabilistic way, all you're going to do is make me question your technical judgement.
- gus_massa 9y ago> the copyright holders for the source code FWIW from https://sourceware.org/glibc/wiki/Contribution%20checklist#FSF_copyright_Assignment https://sourceware.org/glibc/wiki/Contribution%20checklist#F... > The Free Software Foundation (holder of the glibc copyrights) requires copyright assignment for all legally significant changes by a particular author (read not a company). [...]