8 ms·

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

by mycall 9y ago

mikekchar 9y ago
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 be coder #1 on the project. Not that it doesn't happen all over the place...
- llukas 9y ago
  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.
  - eesmith 9y ago
    That's not the way a company works. A CEO is not dictator, and there are more paths to resolution than simply following orders or quitting. Why then should the dictatorial mode be the way a non-profit or volunteer effort works? Moreover, in a company it's the Board of Directors which delegates authority to the CEO. And the shareholders could override even them. So if we interpret glibc as as a cooperative where the shareholders are also the developers and others working on the project, then certainly the shareholders could override management.
    - wiz21c 9y ago
      >>> A CEO is not dictator well, he definitely is for those under him (not those besides).
      - eesmith 9y ago
        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-as-a-dictator-and-impressive-2015-01-20 https://www.marketwatch.com/story/americans-newly-see-obama-... ), Jeremy Corby (http://www.livetradingnews.com/jeremy-corbyn-turns-dictator-power-crumbles-46661.html http://www.livetradingnews.com/jeremy-corbyn-turns-dictator-... ), a teacher's union (https://www.huffingtonpost.com/dave-stieber/i-am-a-dictator-a-chicago_b_7974616.html https://www.huffingtonpost.com/dave-stieber/i-am-a-dictator-... ), and more. When I wrote that, I was thinking specifically of how a union could override a CEO's demands demands, eg, by (threat of) lawsuit over breaking an employment agreement, or by collective action. Then again, a dictator also has to worry about a mass uprising. Then again again, so does a president - the US president is the chief of the executive branch of the US. Do you think a CEO is dictator by definition, or that there is no way for a CEO to be anything other than a dictator? If so, what do you mean by dictator?
        jacobush 9y ago
        People call all sorts of things, all sorts of words. It's common in discourse to use a little hyperbole. That does not make Obama, or Jeremy Corbyn, bona fide dictators. Even as stated, you miss the mark. The president is chief of the executive branch of the US, yes. But the president is not chief of congress, or the judicial system.
        eesmith 9y ago
        Certainly. I was the one who wrote that "the CEO is not a dictator". This is trivially true as the CEO is not the authoritarian head of a country. So I must have meant something a little hyperbolic. I just don't know how to define that in any meaningful sense so as to be able to talk about it. I don't know what mark I missed. I objected to the llukas' proposition that the CEO in a business "ultimately controls the project goals." I agree that in the US government, the chief executive does not have full control. I think it's meaningful point that the chief executive does not necessarily have final control. Personally, I think it's a simpler story to talk about the CEO as some sort of heroic authoritarian leader, which is why we end up with those sorts of stories.
  - shub 9y ago
    Is there really a clear line of authority between the glibc maintainers and RMS? It certainly doesn't seem like it. Authority decays, and RMS's is gone, over glibc at least. Compare with GvR: Guido is involved day-to-day, talks to people, makes decisions. No one questions whether he has power, because he uses it, although they certainly question the way he uses it. I think the monarchy of the United Kingdom is good way to look at RMS's position here. On paper the monarch has a lot of power, but the reality is that they don't and trying to use it would provoke exactly the kind of crisis we're seeing here.
    - labster 9y ago
      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 great deeds. They often end up as the most popular political figures of their republics. So while monarchs are a fossil species in modern governments (since WWI), they retain enough of the royal prerogative to exercise those paper rights it when it actually matters. I think we're all second-guessing RMS here because he's using the perogative in a situation where it truly doesn't matter.
      - mikekchar 9y ago
        Case in point: In Japan Prime Minister Abe wanted to change the constitution to allow Japan to engage in external conflicts if allies were in danger. The emperor of Japan suddenly said, "I'm old, you know. I think I want to retire, but there is no constitutional law that will allow me to abdicate. Please write this law ASAP". Prime Minister Abe does not have resources to do both constitutional changes at the same time... The emperor of Japan is really awesome.
        oblio 9y ago
        I guess they learned from the last few times when military juntas took control of Japan and burned everything to the ground, in the end.
  - hacknat 9y ago
    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.
- rurban 9y ago
  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.
  - DandyDev 9y ago
    The dictator in question certainly doesn't seem Benevolent to me in this case.
    - Tepix 9y ago
      It's not like he is not benevolent either.
    - rurban 9y ago
      He certainly is. He tries to protect the project from morons, which invaded most bigger projects which are not cultured in technical discussions anymore. Compare that to the education of doctors. They need to persist on proper terminology and are hardened in a long process. PC is absolutely counterproductive there. Many obviously did not get the reference in this paragraph, but it still relevant, as this episode showed. Abort vs kill is loaded by a long fight, hence the reference about future censorship attempts.
      - keiyakins 9y ago
        > PC is absolutely counterproductive there A. No, the terminology used by medical professionals is constantly shifting to do things like acknowledge that people with issues are still people. B. Your reasoning is presumably about confusion and lack of clarity, yes? How exactly is a reference to a law that has never been proposed serving that?
    - geezerjay 9y ago
      > The dictator in question certainly doesn't seem Benevolent to me in this case. I don't see the point. RMS directs the organization and establises the policy it follows. I fail to see how a maintainer could feel entitled to dictate that policy just because he has access to the repository. That would be like a printing press janitor feeling entitled to censor what he feels a newspaper should not publish.
- nialv7 9y ago
  Well, let's not forget that "CEO" wrote that technical documentation. And probably also wrote (at least an older version of) the code, too.
  - tomtimtall 9y ago
    Which counts for absolutely nothing. A CEO running around the floor of the business telling programmers what jokes belong in what docs is a shit CEO no matter what he didn’t years past.
    - geezerjay 9y ago
      I fail to see why, if that joke is actually a clear statement of the fundamental message that the project was designed to convey, and the whole reason why the FSF exists.
  - compsciphd 9y ago
    not quite true, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_C_Library#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_C_Library#History
da_chicken 9y ago
Alright, so where is that line drawn? RMS is the project lead, but it's a community project and at some point the consensus will be that he is just wrong. Clearly that line must exist somewhere, or eglibc would never have been. But the existence of a fork isn't the minimum point since that takes quite a lot to overcome the inertia of forming a new project. The point I keep coming back to is: What is the purpose of the documentation? What goal does it achieve?
- nurettin 9y ago
  The benefits of the doc is purely subjective (obviously) so asking what purpose it serves is a dick move. And it specifically says not to remove. RMS only objected when they tried to introduce a change he specifically said not to remove. Calling this an unwarranted exercise in authority is also a dick move. It isn't even a code change. Let's talk priorities: glibc could see improvements preventing y2038 bugs and fuzzing, but we fret over a joke. Also there is no evidence that the joke could be traumatic to anyone.
- esrauch 9y ago
  What is the point of the project? What goal does it achieve? There was a gcc frontend/backend clean architecture dispute: some wanted it so that gcc could be used for more things that clang is being used for. RMS argued against it, on the basis that GCC technical architecture should deliberately avoid it working with proprietary non-GPL backends. The official story is that a technically worse compiler than loses market share is still superior for the FSF goals of pushing free software: they are willing to accept people moving to clang to avoid GCC from being the front half of a non-free compiler. That goal is inherently political. It isn't obvious whether drawing attention to harmful suppression of information by the government is also in the projects mandate, but it is obvious that the projects mandate isn't just to make the best technical and professional result. https://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc/2014-01/msg00209.html https://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc/2014-01/msg00209.html https://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc/2014-01/msg00178.html https://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc/2014-01/msg00178.html
  - da_chicken 9y ago
ocdtrekkie 9y ago
Count for what? Should it excuse his behavior? Should we excuse the behavior of famous and notable people because of their accomplishments?
- icebraining 9y ago
  I don't think it's a matter of excusing, it's whether he has ultimate authority based on the fact that he created glibc and he's the head of GNU. Talking about excusing assumes he did something wrong, which is jumping the gun, since that's exactly what's being discussed.
  - ocdtrekkie 9y ago
    I have a hard time seeing where he did something right here. He is behaving like a petulant child because people didn't find his joke funny two decades later. He is the "boss". No doubt about it, he is the copyright holder, everyone working on the project has surrendered copyright over to him. I've got my strong reservations on BDFLs and the way their egos get stroked, but it is what it is. But he is not a "leader". Because a leader does not cut the legs out from under the people he delegates to run things. He has every right to insist that GNU maintains his dumb joke... and everyone who's put in all of the hard work and effort into the project over these more recent years has the absolute right to leave over it.
    - icebraining 9y ago
      Oh, I don't disagree. I just don't think we have anything to excuse, that's between the maintainers and him.
  - rtpg 9y ago
    If RMS wasn't the project lead, but any other maintainer, then his behavior of making such a big fuss about this particular thing (which, very importantly, _is not a very important thing!_), against the consensus of many other maintainers, is something. If he were on the same level as other people, this behavior wouldn't be accepted. So the question then becomes: Does the fact that he's "the boss" excuse his behavior of fighting against the consensus on an issue of this level of importance?
dragonwriter 9y ago
> Lets think how many hours RMS has put into GNU over the years. That should count for something, no? In terms of personal respect, sure. In terms of attention given to an argument, maybe, but that's also how you end up with a narrow bubble. In terms of retaining a unclear joke designed as backhanded political advocacy on an issue that isn't central to the shared ideology that defines GNU in the technical documentation of a GNU project? I can't see it, no.
chris_wot 9y ago
There are a lot of other people who have spent countless hours on glibc, also.
smsm42 9y ago
I thought the whole point of Free Software idea is that contributing to a software project does not make you its exclusive owner (after you released it under Free Software license) and its users subject to your whims. It is ironic that at the top of this project is a person who would very much like to subject the project to his whims, and for quite a trivial reason at that.
- crististm 9y ago
  No. Free software is about respecting the four freedoms not about what you say above. If it counts to anything, you get the choice to fork the project at any time.
cowsandmilk 9y ago
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 significantly. RMS is well aware of this and the delicate political situation. He should recognize that coming in and declaring himself in charge would not play well with a community that stated about their maintainers following Drepper: "This does not confer any extra ability to make decisions for the project; community consensus is what matters there." [0] https://sourceware.org/ml/libc-alpha/2012-03/msg01040.html https://sourceware.org/ml/libc-alpha/2012-03/msg01040.html
- rurban 9y ago
  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.
  - 2trill2spill 9y ago
    > (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.

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

by mycall 9y ago

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

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 be coder #1 on the project. Not that it doesn't happen all over the place...

llukas 9y ago
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.
- eesmith 9y ago
  That's not the way a company works. A CEO is not dictator, and there are more paths to resolution than simply following orders or quitting. Why then should the dictatorial mode be the way a non-profit or volunteer effort works? Moreover, in a company it's the Board of Directors which delegates authority to the CEO. And the shareholders could override even them. So if we interpret glibc as as a cooperative where the shareholders are also the developers and others working on the project, then certainly the shareholders could override management.
  - wiz21c 9y ago
    >>> A CEO is not dictator well, he definitely is for those under him (not those besides).
    - eesmith 9y ago
      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-as-a-dictator-and-impressive-2015-01-20 https://www.marketwatch.com/story/americans-newly-see-obama-... ), Jeremy Corby (http://www.livetradingnews.com/jeremy-corbyn-turns-dictator-power-crumbles-46661.html http://www.livetradingnews.com/jeremy-corbyn-turns-dictator-... ), a teacher's union (https://www.huffingtonpost.com/dave-stieber/i-am-a-dictator-a-chicago_b_7974616.html https://www.huffingtonpost.com/dave-stieber/i-am-a-dictator-... ), and more. When I wrote that, I was thinking specifically of how a union could override a CEO's demands demands, eg, by (threat of) lawsuit over breaking an employment agreement, or by collective action. Then again, a dictator also has to worry about a mass uprising. Then again again, so does a president - the US president is the chief of the executive branch of the US. Do you think a CEO is dictator by definition, or that there is no way for a CEO to be anything other than a dictator? If so, what do you mean by dictator?
      - jacobush 9y ago
        People call all sorts of things, all sorts of words. It's common in discourse to use a little hyperbole. That does not make Obama, or Jeremy Corbyn, bona fide dictators. Even as stated, you miss the mark. The president is chief of the executive branch of the US, yes. But the president is not chief of congress, or the judicial system.
        eesmith 9y ago
        Certainly. I was the one who wrote that "the CEO is not a dictator". This is trivially true as the CEO is not the authoritarian head of a country. So I must have meant something a little hyperbolic. I just don't know how to define that in any meaningful sense so as to be able to talk about it. I don't know what mark I missed. I objected to the llukas' proposition that the CEO in a business "ultimately controls the project goals." I agree that in the US government, the chief executive does not have full control. I think it's meaningful point that the chief executive does not necessarily have final control. Personally, I think it's a simpler story to talk about the CEO as some sort of heroic authoritarian leader, which is why we end up with those sorts of stories.
- shub 9y ago
  Is there really a clear line of authority between the glibc maintainers and RMS? It certainly doesn't seem like it. Authority decays, and RMS's is gone, over glibc at least. Compare with GvR: Guido is involved day-to-day, talks to people, makes decisions. No one questions whether he has power, because he uses it, although they certainly question the way he uses it. I think the monarchy of the United Kingdom is good way to look at RMS's position here. On paper the monarch has a lot of power, but the reality is that they don't and trying to use it would provoke exactly the kind of crisis we're seeing here.
  - labster 9y ago
    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 great deeds. They often end up as the most popular political figures of their republics. So while monarchs are a fossil species in modern governments (since WWI), they retain enough of the royal prerogative to exercise those paper rights it when it actually matters. I think we're all second-guessing RMS here because he's using the perogative in a situation where it truly doesn't matter.
    - mikekchar 9y ago
      Case in point: In Japan Prime Minister Abe wanted to change the constitution to allow Japan to engage in external conflicts if allies were in danger. The emperor of Japan suddenly said, "I'm old, you know. I think I want to retire, but there is no constitutional law that will allow me to abdicate. Please write this law ASAP". Prime Minister Abe does not have resources to do both constitutional changes at the same time... The emperor of Japan is really awesome.
      - oblio 9y ago
        I guess they learned from the last few times when military juntas took control of Japan and burned everything to the ground, in the end.
- hacknat 9y ago
  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.
rurban 9y ago
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.
- DandyDev 9y ago
  The dictator in question certainly doesn't seem Benevolent to me in this case.
  - Tepix 9y ago
    It's not like he is not benevolent either.
  - rurban 9y ago
    He certainly is. He tries to protect the project from morons, which invaded most bigger projects which are not cultured in technical discussions anymore. Compare that to the education of doctors. They need to persist on proper terminology and are hardened in a long process. PC is absolutely counterproductive there. Many obviously did not get the reference in this paragraph, but it still relevant, as this episode showed. Abort vs kill is loaded by a long fight, hence the reference about future censorship attempts.
    - keiyakins 9y ago
      > PC is absolutely counterproductive there A. No, the terminology used by medical professionals is constantly shifting to do things like acknowledge that people with issues are still people. B. Your reasoning is presumably about confusion and lack of clarity, yes? How exactly is a reference to a law that has never been proposed serving that?
  - geezerjay 9y ago
    > The dictator in question certainly doesn't seem Benevolent to me in this case. I don't see the point. RMS directs the organization and establises the policy it follows. I fail to see how a maintainer could feel entitled to dictate that policy just because he has access to the repository. That would be like a printing press janitor feeling entitled to censor what he feels a newspaper should not publish.
nialv7 9y ago
Well, let's not forget that "CEO" wrote that technical documentation. And probably also wrote (at least an older version of) the code, too.
- tomtimtall 9y ago
  Which counts for absolutely nothing. A CEO running around the floor of the business telling programmers what jokes belong in what docs is a shit CEO no matter what he didn’t years past.
  - geezerjay 9y ago
    I fail to see why, if that joke is actually a clear statement of the fundamental message that the project was designed to convey, and the whole reason why the FSF exists.
- compsciphd 9y ago
  not quite true, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_C_Library#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_C_Library#History

da_chicken 9y ago

Alright, so where is that line drawn? RMS is the project lead, but it's a community project and at some point the consensus will be that he is just wrong. Clearly that line must exist somewhere, or eglibc would never have been. But the existence of a fork isn't the minimum point since that takes quite a lot to overcome the inertia of forming a new project. The point I keep coming back to is: What is the purpose of the documentation? What goal does it achieve?

nurettin 9y ago
The benefits of the doc is purely subjective (obviously) so asking what purpose it serves is a dick move. And it specifically says not to remove. RMS only objected when they tried to introduce a change he specifically said not to remove. Calling this an unwarranted exercise in authority is also a dick move. It isn't even a code change. Let's talk priorities: glibc could see improvements preventing y2038 bugs and fuzzing, but we fret over a joke. Also there is no evidence that the joke could be traumatic to anyone.
esrauch 9y ago
What is the point of the project? What goal does it achieve? There was a gcc frontend/backend clean architecture dispute: some wanted it so that gcc could be used for more things that clang is being used for. RMS argued against it, on the basis that GCC technical architecture should deliberately avoid it working with proprietary non-GPL backends. The official story is that a technically worse compiler than loses market share is still superior for the FSF goals of pushing free software: they are willing to accept people moving to clang to avoid GCC from being the front half of a non-free compiler. That goal is inherently political. It isn't obvious whether drawing attention to harmful suppression of information by the government is also in the projects mandate, but it is obvious that the projects mandate isn't just to make the best technical and professional result. https://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc/2014-01/msg00209.html https://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc/2014-01/msg00209.html https://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc/2014-01/msg00178.html https://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc/2014-01/msg00178.html
- da_chicken 9y ago

ocdtrekkie 9y ago

Count for what? Should it excuse his behavior? Should we excuse the behavior of famous and notable people because of their accomplishments?

icebraining 9y ago
I don't think it's a matter of excusing, it's whether he has ultimate authority based on the fact that he created glibc and he's the head of GNU. Talking about excusing assumes he did something wrong, which is jumping the gun, since that's exactly what's being discussed.
- ocdtrekkie 9y ago
  I have a hard time seeing where he did something right here. He is behaving like a petulant child because people didn't find his joke funny two decades later. He is the "boss". No doubt about it, he is the copyright holder, everyone working on the project has surrendered copyright over to him. I've got my strong reservations on BDFLs and the way their egos get stroked, but it is what it is. But he is not a "leader". Because a leader does not cut the legs out from under the people he delegates to run things. He has every right to insist that GNU maintains his dumb joke... and everyone who's put in all of the hard work and effort into the project over these more recent years has the absolute right to leave over it.
  - icebraining 9y ago
    Oh, I don't disagree. I just don't think we have anything to excuse, that's between the maintainers and him.
- rtpg 9y ago
  If RMS wasn't the project lead, but any other maintainer, then his behavior of making such a big fuss about this particular thing (which, very importantly, _is not a very important thing!_), against the consensus of many other maintainers, is something. If he were on the same level as other people, this behavior wouldn't be accepted. So the question then becomes: Does the fact that he's "the boss" excuse his behavior of fighting against the consensus on an issue of this level of importance?

dragonwriter 9y ago

> Lets think how many hours RMS has put into GNU over the years. That should count for something, no? In terms of personal respect, sure. In terms of attention given to an argument, maybe, but that's also how you end up with a narrow bubble. In terms of retaining a unclear joke designed as backhanded political advocacy on an issue that isn't central to the shared ideology that defines GNU in the technical documentation of a GNU project? I can't see it, no.

chris_wot 9y ago

There are a lot of other people who have spent countless hours on glibc, also.

smsm42 9y ago

I thought the whole point of Free Software idea is that contributing to a software project does not make you its exclusive owner (after you released it under Free Software license) and its users subject to your whims. It is ironic that at the top of this project is a person who would very much like to subject the project to his whims, and for quite a trivial reason at that.

crististm 9y ago
No. Free software is about respecting the four freedoms not about what you say above. If it counts to anything, you get the choice to fork the project at any time.

cowsandmilk 9y ago

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 significantly. RMS is well aware of this and the delicate political situation. He should recognize that coming in and declaring himself in charge would not play well with a community that stated about their maintainers following Drepper: "This does not confer any extra ability to make decisions for the project; community consensus is what matters there." [0] https://sourceware.org/ml/libc-alpha/2012-03/msg01040.html https://sourceware.org/ml/libc-alpha/2012-03/msg01040.html

rurban 9y ago
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.
- 2trill2spill 9y ago
  > (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.