10 ms·

30 years late to the party, and in a format that is inaccessible to anyone just casually browsing the web but needs to be built using 40+ year old build systems

30 years late to the party, and in a format that is inaccessible to anyone just casually browsing the web but needs to be built using 40+ year old build systems, hosted on a server that apparently cannot handle the "gentle" influx of HN readers... Sounds just like any other GNU project ;-) I mean I seriously admire RMS's endurance and persistence, and I'm looking forward to this manual, I'm sure it'll be great, but is this really what GCC needs most? A new language manual?

jacooper 4y ago
Man, the FSF and the GNU project need a new refresh and new blood in them ASAP. everything from their projects, to their websites is outdated and distant from how people actually use tech everyday.
- pram 4y ago
  IIRC Stallman 'browses the web' with something like a cron job scraping URLs with Lynx, and then it emails him the output so he can peruse it later. This isn't a joke lol
  - AdmiralAsshat 4y ago
    I believe he used to print them out, so perhaps we should consider at least reading them via an email client to be some sort of progress. Although I'm sure it was to be more "eco-friendly" than anything
  - ydlr 4y ago
    That sounds... reasonable. There are some web-to-newsletter services that try to sell this feature.
  - bitwize 4y ago
    Given how intrusive, ad-encrusted, and potentially malware-encrusted the web is becoming, this sounds like one of those Stallman absurdities that make increasing amounts of sense the more you think on them.
    - starkd 4y ago
      Exactly. We need characters like RMS to buck the trends, even if they come off as a*holes to us. And RMS was right about the danger of software not being under our control.
      - Joker_vD 4y ago
        Which is why RMS and FSF tried to get the software under their control. Thankfully, they are much less adept at it than the commercial firms, so that attempt ultimately failed.
        starkd 4y ago
        Not understanding how they did this. The movement merely supports a license that insists code is available to end users.
        bitwize 4y ago
        The FSF demands copyright assignation for all contributions to its projects. E.g., if you want your code to make it into Emacs, both you and your employer need to sign it over to the FSF.
    - gaius_baltar 4y ago
      It is like that "Stallman was right" subreddit is getting righter and righter every day. Except that Stallman is under some kind of Cassandra Curse, so people ignore all the signs, even when they are repeated by persons more skilled in PR tactics.
  - davexunit 4y ago
    He did that for a long time, maybe still does for certain things for all I know, but he started using GNU IceCat (a firefox derivative) some years ago.
  - dvfjsdhgfv 4y ago
    I actually envy him for being able to do so.
  - abawany 4y ago
    Sounds like a great way to prevent brain death brought about by the WMD (weapons of mental destruction) such as infini-scroll, etc.
  - Koshkin 4y ago
    I used RSS to read HN up until Google killed their reader. (Being able to filter the feed by the post title was nice.)
- therouwboat 4y ago
  You open the site and read, what else do you need?
  - spookthesunset 4y ago
    I mean, you kinda can't easily read this language reference from the site. So making that an easy to access set of HTML files would be a start.
    - Brian_K_White 4y ago
      The reference doesn't exist yet. This is the source to the reference.
- krapp 4y ago
  >everything from their projects, to their websites is outdated and distant from how people actually use tech everyday. It makes sense if you think of the FSF as a religion, and consider the thesis of the Free Software movement as theological - free software is an ultimate moral good, proprietary software is an ultimate moral evil, and the FSF sees themselves as clergy spreading the gospel and purifying themselves from the corruption and degradation of modernity. Sacred rituals and texts tend not to change over time, after all, being sacred they don't need to change.
  - bogwog 4y ago
    The religion analogy is unnecessary. The FSF is a non-profit with the goal of fostering free software. As a non-profit, their actions and their investments are focused on their goal, not on becoming profitable. As an example, RMS himself actually recommends the dual licensing model of Qt for organizations looking to make a profit and contribute to the free software movement. With that model, the software is available under a copyleft license (GPL) and a proprietary commercial license (for those willing to pay) But as the FSF is not focused on profits (again, because they’re a non-profit organization), all of their software is exclusively licensed using copyleft licenses like GPL and LGPL. Not because it’s a “religion”, but because it’s literally the entire goal of the organization.
    - KennyBlanken 4y ago
      > As a non-profit, their actions and their investments are focused on their goal, not on becoming profitable. 1)You can't succeed as a non-profit if you don't make money. 2)If the FSF cared about their goal of fostering free software blah blah, then why didn't they fire RMS out a cannon when basically the entire open-source world said "fire that serial sexual harasser who keeps opening his mouth about child rape not being rape, or we stop giving you money / working with you." They chose, overwhelmingly and very petulantly, to continue letting RMS have a leadership role.
      - sweetbitter 4y ago
        They didn't fire him because he did not do any sexual harassment, and his comment about children was made earnestly but out of a place of ignorance. I've met plenty of people who are at least that socially dense with that low of a filter, it's not really surprising that someone like this would have ignorance of such a topic + the lack of tact required to speak about it. If anything, that kind of sheer honesty and invulnerability to peer pressure gives him an advantage over ordinary people in a leadership role.
- davexunit 4y ago
  Here's an anecdote: In 2014, as part of my job as fsf's web developer (a new position at the time), I suggested moving gnu.org's version control from a private cvs repo (that requires passing a test to get access to) to a public git repo as a step towards attracting new contributors. The argument was simple: Not many new volunteers are coming in to work on gnu.org and very few know cvs any more. Making it operate more like a regular free software project that can receive patches from anyone and using the most popular version control system would lower the barrier to entry and improve transparency. It was viewed as a reasonable goal by the people I worked with at the fsf, but gnu has its own governance and the idea was met with strong resistance from all of the longtime gnu.org contributors, including rms. I even received an unpleasant off-list email (not from rms) because I was viewed as an outsider that doesn't know anything. So, that was the end of that little idea. There is a glimmer of hope for gnu's future in subprojects such as guix, which is doing technically interesting work and has created a healthy community that welcomes newcomers. Can that positive energy take hold and spread to the rest of the project? We'll see.
  - macintux 4y ago
    I still remember in 1996 searching for GNU online only to discover they weren’t running on their own domain, instead something buried on (IIRC) mit.edu. I also couldn’t find any gcc binaries for Solaris online, had to steal a copy from my school’s IT administrator to help get a startup up and running. They definitely have serious challenges with inertia.
    - teddyh 4y ago
      Probably prep.ai.mit.edu. MIT does that kind of thing; It’s like tsx-11.mit.edu, the famous US Linux FTP mirror, which was, IIRC, originally Theodore Ts'o personal workstation at MIT.
  - KennyBlanken 4y ago
    A former boss still tells people about the time he emailed an address at gnu.org to inform them that a mirror was broken, and made the mistake of using "linux", and got a page-long rant from Stallman himself about how it was "gnu/linux" ...and nobody fixed the FTP site.
- sidkshatriya 4y ago
  I equally detest websites which are extremely graphics and animation intensive. When I see a lot of graphics and presentation my mind goes: "Sales pitch upcoming. Be careful!!" I actually like highly functional websites with a light touch that conveys sophistication. GNU's websites don't come in that category, of course.
  - jacooper 4y ago
    I'm not asking for something full of animations. I'm just asking for something modern and useful, like GitHub and Gitea. The total opposite of Savannah.
- b3morales 4y ago
  Personally, most of the times I visit gnu.org I'm browsing the Emacs manuals and I do have to say I appreciate the simple HTML rendering. It makes them easy to read and navigate.
- starkd 4y ago
  Not every thing is about ease of use. Sometimes doing things without a nice GUI interface forces you to understand the system better. All the UI's and documentation systems are taking on the same boring corporate gloss. It has its uses, but it feels dead. It's not invigorating.
- dwringer 4y ago
  > everything from their projects, to their websites is outdated and distant from how people actually use tech everyday. That's... kind of the point, no? Most people use computers most of the time in a way that's not free by FSF standards.
- dark-star 4y ago
  yeah, I expect GNU to go the way of the dodo in the not-so-distant future. Most projects will survive, of course, but probably under new leadership or something. In every other industry you learn to adapt to new developments until you retire, yet GNU seems to insist on using decades-old software (cvs, autotools, ...) just because. That just has to backfire at some point...
  - cies 4y ago
    > Most projects will survive, of course, but probably under new leadership or something. That is called a fork. For the fork to work you need momentum. Historically this did not work really well. And the forks mostly died. What I do see is that big biz does not like (L)GPL (and absolutely hate AGPL), so they prefer to through their momentum behind BSD (and similar) licensed code. This is how a lot of momentum was focused away from GNU projects (e.g.: LLVM over GCC)
    - dark-star 4y ago
      > That is called a fork No that's not what I mean. I mean more like GNOME which once was a GNU project and then left GNU to continue on their own. There are more examples like that. They don't need new manpower or inertia. They just drop GNU if they feel it keeps them back (which a lot of projects recently think, apparently, after the whole RMS drama some time back)
  - tpoacher 4y ago
    Not true. There's a large number of industries that prefer reliable older tech to unreliable ephemeral new tech.
  - teddyh 4y ago
    People have been predicting the end of GNU ever since the beginning, perhaps starting in earnest in 1994, when the GNU project was 10 years old! Outdated, obsolete, practically one foot in the grave, surely, people said. And yet here we are in 2022, RMS being more right than ever.
- dark-star 4y ago
  Funny anecdote from an IRC chat I "overheard" today. The chat was for a relatively new GNU command line tool. It was discussed whether it would be possible to detect changes to a file being edited through "outside" programs, before saving. The typical "the file you have opened was changed on disk. Overwrite/Reload/..." question. It was suggested that they could use inotify for that. A GNU developer responded with "there's no inotify on OpenBSD". Then discussion went to "could we maybe use kqueue there?" The response from said GNU developer? I quote, and this is not a joke: "There are plenty of systems without kqueue. Like TOPS-10" The other developer jokingly said that he didn't know of anyone still using TOPS-10, to which the GNU developer responded along the lines of "Well, I am intending to compile and run this on TOPS-10, so we should use a mechanism similar to what EMACS does to detect those changes, as that is portable to more systems and is equally safe, i.e. race-condition-free" I'm not sure if the race conditions in the "EMACS way" are actually there or not (I didn't feel like reading the elisp code for saving files), the discussion quickly went to filesystem requirements, NFS and other remote filesystems, etc. But the fact that they are considering porting to an OS that has been out of (active) use for more than 30 years over using more recent APIs on more modern OS's shows how far in the past they are stuck. And this is only a very recent example that I wanted to share, there are many more such examples if you know where to look (mailing lists etc.). Things like "we cannot change this as SunOS requires this-or-that" and "this will break on VMS" are still things they are thinking about... I mean I get it, backwards compatibility is cool and all, but some things can be taken a bit to the extreme...
mr_gibbins 4y ago
Agreed. This sounds like the kind of thing I'd like to fill my Tuesday evening with, but had to refer to the instructions from the kind commenter below to install packages to build the LaTeX file since my Texmaker refused point-blank to have anything to do with it. Of course it's Linux only, so means using WSL on my Windows laptop. Managed to open the file, no instructions whatsoever for finding a compiler other than 'get the GCC one'. Okay. Found the mirror, downloaded it and just now reading the installation manual. Yes, it's a manual, basically. Two dozen prerequisite packages to install by hand before I do anything else. It's guaranteed not to work on WSL so I'll have to spend an hour or two just getting a compiler up and running, that's assuming it works at all and I don't just have to fire up a Debian VM and start again. I get C is hard, and is supposed to be hard, but it's like GNU are going out of their way to make this intentionally more difficult than it needs to be.
- I_dev_outdoors 4y ago
  You are kinda getting of the beaten path here and you seem to know it.
- maxlybbert 4y ago
  I’m sure they’ll eventually make a PDF and HTML pages easily available on their site, like they have for plenty of other manuals. This announcement is more along the lines of “if you want to help us with the finishing touches, here’s where to go.”
- Koshkin 4y ago
  > C is hard, and is supposed to be hard I don't know why anyone would say that. C remains a simple little language. It is programming, especially the kind C is used for, that is hard.
  - cies 4y ago
    Exactly. C was a lot easier than the alternatives back when it got invented. It's simplicity that characterizes a good design.
- 4y ago
Longlius 4y ago
I mean, it's not even done yet. He doesn't really want anyone reading it yet. I imagine once it's complete we'll have the standard HTML single page, HTML multi-page, PDF, etc. options you see with all other GNU publications.
- steveklabnik 4y ago
  If he doesn't want anyone to read it, why does this announcement say > Please report any flaws, including any passage that is unclear or hard to understand. ?
  - DiggyJohnson 4y ago
    If you add a bit of nuance to your interpretation of GP’s comment this will make a whole lot of sense. It’s pre-publish. That’s all they’re saying. And that’s clearly the case, it seems.
- deanmen 4y ago
  Yes they should put the built versions online when it's done. Right now you can generate a PDF or HTML from the texi
davexunit 4y ago
The link is to the git hosting platform for GNU that contains the texinfo source and seems more intended as an announcement to those that want to get in early and build the manual for themselves. I'm sure it will ultimately be posted in html form on gnu.org, like every other manual. I'm honestly shocked to see rms using git. He used to refuse to use it.
- tjr 4y ago
  Yes, although, while actually working on the manual, we didn't use Git. We passed diffs back and forth over email.
KennyBlanken 4y ago
There is nothing admirable about actively blocking progress by refusing to admit that you are unsuitable for your role as a representative an ambassador of a movement, unpopular to the point of hundreds of organizations criticizing you remaining in a leadership role / refusing to work with your org until you leave, and generally being ineffective. Stallman should have passed the torch twenty years ago. Open source as a movement would have progressed far more if it had been represented by someone with a more pragmatic view and a modicum of basic social skills, instead of an inflexible, dogmatic, anti-social asshole.
- starkd 4y ago
  Was that really necessary? Like him or not, he is still somewhat of a legend. For all those denigrating someone as being too old, they might look in the mirror. You will end up "too old" one day too. And faster than you think.
  - rhapsodic 4y ago
  - KennyBlanken 4y ago
    Nothing in my comment "denigrates RMS for being too old." Lacking any form of social grace or interpersonal skills to the point that he picks and eats his toe-cheese while on-stage for a speaking engagement, being a serial sexual harasser and general pest of women (including telling multiple college-age women that if they don't date him he'd kill himself) to the point that all the women in his office kept substantial houseplant collections in their offices because he hates houseplants, and being unable to even shut his mouth about how 'really, age is just a number' when it comes to sex with kids, and becomes extremely petulant about it when everyone objects to those views... ...is not "denigrating someone as being too old."
    - Koshkin 4y ago
      > twenty years ago... college-age women That's literally saying "too old."
kazinator 4y ago
If we were were to identify what GCC needs most, do you necessarily want RMS on that task? There are enough people that someone else can work on what GCC needs most, while RMS hacks on a manual. GCC is a bloated mess with 50+ megabyte back-end executables; in my opinion, what it needs most is to go on some kind of diet.
jolmg 4y ago
> 30 years late to the party. Why 30 years late? Their earlier manual[1] already covers the C language as standardized 20 years ago with C99. This new one makes mention of at least C11. If it doesn't include features of a later standard, it's at most like 10 years late if you can expect anyone to write a publication like this in a single year. > in a format that is inaccessible to anyone just casually browsing the web but needs to be built using 40+ year old build systems Nothing wrong with software being old. It's stable and reliable. Also, I'm not sure the format has any competition, taking into account feature parity. [1] https://www.gnu.org/software/gnu-c-manual/gnu-c-manual.html https://www.gnu.org/software/gnu-c-manual/gnu-c-manual.html
- tjr 4y ago
  So one remark with respect to being late to the party and writing a publication like this in a single year... I was the main author on that [1] link there. Richard contacted me ten years ago (in January 2012, as I recall) about his new forthcoming book. I ended up helping him with the new book, but I figured that with this new one coming out, no reason to do much more with the one I had written. So indeed, it never got past coverage of C99 and other GCC extensions circa C99. I honestly did not expect that it was going to be ten years before his new book was finished, or I might would have put more work into the one that I started. Oh well! The new one is finally out. :-)
- dark-star 4y ago
  > This new one makes mention of at least C11 Indeed, I haven't spotted these on my first glance over the document. So yeah, it's probably only 10-15 years late when it comes out. I'm still amazed that RMS is taking C11 into account, I would have guessed he prefered C99 > Nothing wrong with software being old. It's stable and reliable. I'm sure you're having fun driving your old Ford Country Squire, watching television on an old RCA TV set and using a rotary phone to call friends and family ;-) Of course you are right in that there is nothing inherently wrong with using old software. And yes, it might be more stable than the shiniest newest tech. But there are middle grounds that exist as well that get you nifty features or quality-of-life improvements, and don't intimidate newcomers that much than having to first find out what that CVS is that GNU is still using in some areas ;-)
mhh__ 4y ago
If it keeps him away from the rest of GCC then it's good for GCC. Harsh but realistic.
JJMcJ 4y ago
Make, tex, dvipdf, makeinfo? Still in active use.
cies 4y ago
> is this really what GCC needs most Nah. It's what some programmers need most, especially those that cannot/willnot pirate a manual, or want to be able to give back improvements as they study it.
deanmen 4y ago
It is possible to convert the TexInfo file to a PDF
deanmen 4y ago
It's a standard TeX file built using the GNU texinfo macros, it can be converted to a PDF using TeX or a HTML, docbook, or GNU info page using `makeinfo`
1vuio0pswjnm7 4y ago
Perl is used to convert texi files to html, plaintext, pdf, etc.^1 How to get the perl script for coverting texi On Linux install texinfo On BSD install text2html Below is a tiny script to make this manual as a 639K text file called "c.txt" to read with less(1) and edited with vi(1), according to personal preferences.^2 Your preferences may differ. We may be different people using different computers and different software. 1. https://www.nongnu.org/texi2html/ https://www.nongnu.org/texi2html/ https://texfaq.org/FAQ-texinfo https://texfaq.org/FAQ-texinfo 2. Example personal preferences: Avoid git where it's not needed. Use links browser to dump html to text. Indent text at least 4 spaces, leave large right margins (here, column width = 70). Use curl only for HN examples. IRL, use tnftp. #!/bin/sh set -v; x0=c-intro-and-ref.git; x1=https://git.savannah.nongnu.org/cgit/; test -d $x0||mkdir $x0;cd $x0||exit; for x2 in Makefile c.texi cpp.texi fdl.texi fp.texi texinfo.tex;do echo url=$x1$x0/plain/$x2; echo output=$x2; echo user-agent=\"\"; done|curl -K/dev/stdin -s; case $(uname) in :) ;;*BSD) texi2html --no-headers --no-split --html c.texi ;;Linux) makeinfo --no-headers --no-split --html c.texi esac; links -width 70 -dump .html \ |sed '/^ *Link:/d;/^ *\*/s/\*//;s/^/ /;/Jump to: /{N;N;d;}' > c.txt; # personal preference: uninstall perl to conserve space; exec less c.txt;
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 4y ago
  s/text2html/texi2html/
tbodt 4y ago
All GNU documentation is written in this format. But here they seem to have neglected the standard procedure of converting to HTML before publishing...

jacooper 4y ago

Man, the FSF and the GNU project need a new refresh and new blood in them ASAP. everything from their projects, to their websites is outdated and distant from how people actually use tech everyday.

pram 4y ago
IIRC Stallman 'browses the web' with something like a cron job scraping URLs with Lynx, and then it emails him the output so he can peruse it later. This isn't a joke lol
- AdmiralAsshat 4y ago
  I believe he used to print them out, so perhaps we should consider at least reading them via an email client to be some sort of progress. Although I'm sure it was to be more "eco-friendly" than anything
- ydlr 4y ago
  That sounds... reasonable. There are some web-to-newsletter services that try to sell this feature.
- bitwize 4y ago
  Given how intrusive, ad-encrusted, and potentially malware-encrusted the web is becoming, this sounds like one of those Stallman absurdities that make increasing amounts of sense the more you think on them.
  - starkd 4y ago
    Exactly. We need characters like RMS to buck the trends, even if they come off as a*holes to us. And RMS was right about the danger of software not being under our control.
    - Joker_vD 4y ago
      Which is why RMS and FSF tried to get the software under their control. Thankfully, they are much less adept at it than the commercial firms, so that attempt ultimately failed.
      - starkd 4y ago
        Not understanding how they did this. The movement merely supports a license that insists code is available to end users.
        bitwize 4y ago
        The FSF demands copyright assignation for all contributions to its projects. E.g., if you want your code to make it into Emacs, both you and your employer need to sign it over to the FSF.
  - gaius_baltar 4y ago
    It is like that "Stallman was right" subreddit is getting righter and righter every day. Except that Stallman is under some kind of Cassandra Curse, so people ignore all the signs, even when they are repeated by persons more skilled in PR tactics.
- davexunit 4y ago
  He did that for a long time, maybe still does for certain things for all I know, but he started using GNU IceCat (a firefox derivative) some years ago.
- dvfjsdhgfv 4y ago
  I actually envy him for being able to do so.
- abawany 4y ago
  Sounds like a great way to prevent brain death brought about by the WMD (weapons of mental destruction) such as infini-scroll, etc.
- Koshkin 4y ago
  I used RSS to read HN up until Google killed their reader. (Being able to filter the feed by the post title was nice.)
therouwboat 4y ago
You open the site and read, what else do you need?
- spookthesunset 4y ago
  I mean, you kinda can't easily read this language reference from the site. So making that an easy to access set of HTML files would be a start.
  - Brian_K_White 4y ago
    The reference doesn't exist yet. This is the source to the reference.
krapp 4y ago
>everything from their projects, to their websites is outdated and distant from how people actually use tech everyday. It makes sense if you think of the FSF as a religion, and consider the thesis of the Free Software movement as theological - free software is an ultimate moral good, proprietary software is an ultimate moral evil, and the FSF sees themselves as clergy spreading the gospel and purifying themselves from the corruption and degradation of modernity. Sacred rituals and texts tend not to change over time, after all, being sacred they don't need to change.
- bogwog 4y ago
  The religion analogy is unnecessary. The FSF is a non-profit with the goal of fostering free software. As a non-profit, their actions and their investments are focused on their goal, not on becoming profitable. As an example, RMS himself actually recommends the dual licensing model of Qt for organizations looking to make a profit and contribute to the free software movement. With that model, the software is available under a copyleft license (GPL) and a proprietary commercial license (for those willing to pay) But as the FSF is not focused on profits (again, because they’re a non-profit organization), all of their software is exclusively licensed using copyleft licenses like GPL and LGPL. Not because it’s a “religion”, but because it’s literally the entire goal of the organization.
  - KennyBlanken 4y ago
    > As a non-profit, their actions and their investments are focused on their goal, not on becoming profitable. 1)You can't succeed as a non-profit if you don't make money. 2)If the FSF cared about their goal of fostering free software blah blah, then why didn't they fire RMS out a cannon when basically the entire open-source world said "fire that serial sexual harasser who keeps opening his mouth about child rape not being rape, or we stop giving you money / working with you." They chose, overwhelmingly and very petulantly, to continue letting RMS have a leadership role.
    - sweetbitter 4y ago
      They didn't fire him because he did not do any sexual harassment, and his comment about children was made earnestly but out of a place of ignorance. I've met plenty of people who are at least that socially dense with that low of a filter, it's not really surprising that someone like this would have ignorance of such a topic + the lack of tact required to speak about it. If anything, that kind of sheer honesty and invulnerability to peer pressure gives him an advantage over ordinary people in a leadership role.
davexunit 4y ago
Here's an anecdote: In 2014, as part of my job as fsf's web developer (a new position at the time), I suggested moving gnu.org's version control from a private cvs repo (that requires passing a test to get access to) to a public git repo as a step towards attracting new contributors. The argument was simple: Not many new volunteers are coming in to work on gnu.org and very few know cvs any more. Making it operate more like a regular free software project that can receive patches from anyone and using the most popular version control system would lower the barrier to entry and improve transparency. It was viewed as a reasonable goal by the people I worked with at the fsf, but gnu has its own governance and the idea was met with strong resistance from all of the longtime gnu.org contributors, including rms. I even received an unpleasant off-list email (not from rms) because I was viewed as an outsider that doesn't know anything. So, that was the end of that little idea. There is a glimmer of hope for gnu's future in subprojects such as guix, which is doing technically interesting work and has created a healthy community that welcomes newcomers. Can that positive energy take hold and spread to the rest of the project? We'll see.
- macintux 4y ago
  I still remember in 1996 searching for GNU online only to discover they weren’t running on their own domain, instead something buried on (IIRC) mit.edu. I also couldn’t find any gcc binaries for Solaris online, had to steal a copy from my school’s IT administrator to help get a startup up and running. They definitely have serious challenges with inertia.
  - teddyh 4y ago
    Probably prep.ai.mit.edu. MIT does that kind of thing; It’s like tsx-11.mit.edu, the famous US Linux FTP mirror, which was, IIRC, originally Theodore Ts'o personal workstation at MIT.
- KennyBlanken 4y ago
  A former boss still tells people about the time he emailed an address at gnu.org to inform them that a mirror was broken, and made the mistake of using "linux", and got a page-long rant from Stallman himself about how it was "gnu/linux" ...and nobody fixed the FTP site.
sidkshatriya 4y ago
I equally detest websites which are extremely graphics and animation intensive. When I see a lot of graphics and presentation my mind goes: "Sales pitch upcoming. Be careful!!" I actually like highly functional websites with a light touch that conveys sophistication. GNU's websites don't come in that category, of course.
- jacooper 4y ago
  I'm not asking for something full of animations. I'm just asking for something modern and useful, like GitHub and Gitea. The total opposite of Savannah.
b3morales 4y ago
Personally, most of the times I visit gnu.org I'm browsing the Emacs manuals and I do have to say I appreciate the simple HTML rendering. It makes them easy to read and navigate.
starkd 4y ago
Not every thing is about ease of use. Sometimes doing things without a nice GUI interface forces you to understand the system better. All the UI's and documentation systems are taking on the same boring corporate gloss. It has its uses, but it feels dead. It's not invigorating.
dwringer 4y ago
> everything from their projects, to their websites is outdated and distant from how people actually use tech everyday. That's... kind of the point, no? Most people use computers most of the time in a way that's not free by FSF standards.
dark-star 4y ago
yeah, I expect GNU to go the way of the dodo in the not-so-distant future. Most projects will survive, of course, but probably under new leadership or something. In every other industry you learn to adapt to new developments until you retire, yet GNU seems to insist on using decades-old software (cvs, autotools, ...) just because. That just has to backfire at some point...
- cies 4y ago
  > Most projects will survive, of course, but probably under new leadership or something. That is called a fork. For the fork to work you need momentum. Historically this did not work really well. And the forks mostly died. What I do see is that big biz does not like (L)GPL (and absolutely hate AGPL), so they prefer to through their momentum behind BSD (and similar) licensed code. This is how a lot of momentum was focused away from GNU projects (e.g.: LLVM over GCC)
  - dark-star 4y ago
    > That is called a fork No that's not what I mean. I mean more like GNOME which once was a GNU project and then left GNU to continue on their own. There are more examples like that. They don't need new manpower or inertia. They just drop GNU if they feel it keeps them back (which a lot of projects recently think, apparently, after the whole RMS drama some time back)
- tpoacher 4y ago
  Not true. There's a large number of industries that prefer reliable older tech to unreliable ephemeral new tech.
- teddyh 4y ago
  People have been predicting the end of GNU ever since the beginning, perhaps starting in earnest in 1994, when the GNU project was 10 years old! Outdated, obsolete, practically one foot in the grave, surely, people said. And yet here we are in 2022, RMS being more right than ever.
dark-star 4y ago
Funny anecdote from an IRC chat I "overheard" today. The chat was for a relatively new GNU command line tool. It was discussed whether it would be possible to detect changes to a file being edited through "outside" programs, before saving. The typical "the file you have opened was changed on disk. Overwrite/Reload/..." question. It was suggested that they could use inotify for that. A GNU developer responded with "there's no inotify on OpenBSD". Then discussion went to "could we maybe use kqueue there?" The response from said GNU developer? I quote, and this is not a joke: "There are plenty of systems without kqueue. Like TOPS-10" The other developer jokingly said that he didn't know of anyone still using TOPS-10, to which the GNU developer responded along the lines of "Well, I am intending to compile and run this on TOPS-10, so we should use a mechanism similar to what EMACS does to detect those changes, as that is portable to more systems and is equally safe, i.e. race-condition-free" I'm not sure if the race conditions in the "EMACS way" are actually there or not (I didn't feel like reading the elisp code for saving files), the discussion quickly went to filesystem requirements, NFS and other remote filesystems, etc. But the fact that they are considering porting to an OS that has been out of (active) use for more than 30 years over using more recent APIs on more modern OS's shows how far in the past they are stuck. And this is only a very recent example that I wanted to share, there are many more such examples if you know where to look (mailing lists etc.). Things like "we cannot change this as SunOS requires this-or-that" and "this will break on VMS" are still things they are thinking about... I mean I get it, backwards compatibility is cool and all, but some things can be taken a bit to the extreme...

mr_gibbins 4y ago

Agreed. This sounds like the kind of thing I'd like to fill my Tuesday evening with, but had to refer to the instructions from the kind commenter below to install packages to build the LaTeX file since my Texmaker refused point-blank to have anything to do with it. Of course it's Linux only, so means using WSL on my Windows laptop. Managed to open the file, no instructions whatsoever for finding a compiler other than 'get the GCC one'. Okay. Found the mirror, downloaded it and just now reading the installation manual. Yes, it's a manual, basically. Two dozen prerequisite packages to install by hand before I do anything else. It's guaranteed not to work on WSL so I'll have to spend an hour or two just getting a compiler up and running, that's assuming it works at all and I don't just have to fire up a Debian VM and start again. I get C is hard, and is supposed to be hard, but it's like GNU are going out of their way to make this intentionally more difficult than it needs to be.

I_dev_outdoors 4y ago
You are kinda getting of the beaten path here and you seem to know it.
maxlybbert 4y ago
I’m sure they’ll eventually make a PDF and HTML pages easily available on their site, like they have for plenty of other manuals. This announcement is more along the lines of “if you want to help us with the finishing touches, here’s where to go.”
Koshkin 4y ago
> C is hard, and is supposed to be hard I don't know why anyone would say that. C remains a simple little language. It is programming, especially the kind C is used for, that is hard.
- cies 4y ago
  Exactly. C was a lot easier than the alternatives back when it got invented. It's simplicity that characterizes a good design.
4y ago

Longlius 4y ago

I mean, it's not even done yet. He doesn't really want anyone reading it yet. I imagine once it's complete we'll have the standard HTML single page, HTML multi-page, PDF, etc. options you see with all other GNU publications.

steveklabnik 4y ago
If he doesn't want anyone to read it, why does this announcement say > Please report any flaws, including any passage that is unclear or hard to understand. ?
- DiggyJohnson 4y ago
  If you add a bit of nuance to your interpretation of GP’s comment this will make a whole lot of sense. It’s pre-publish. That’s all they’re saying. And that’s clearly the case, it seems.
deanmen 4y ago
Yes they should put the built versions online when it's done. Right now you can generate a PDF or HTML from the texi

davexunit 4y ago

The link is to the git hosting platform for GNU that contains the texinfo source and seems more intended as an announcement to those that want to get in early and build the manual for themselves. I'm sure it will ultimately be posted in html form on gnu.org, like every other manual. I'm honestly shocked to see rms using git. He used to refuse to use it.

tjr 4y ago
Yes, although, while actually working on the manual, we didn't use Git. We passed diffs back and forth over email.

KennyBlanken 4y ago

There is nothing admirable about actively blocking progress by refusing to admit that you are unsuitable for your role as a representative an ambassador of a movement, unpopular to the point of hundreds of organizations criticizing you remaining in a leadership role / refusing to work with your org until you leave, and generally being ineffective. Stallman should have passed the torch twenty years ago. Open source as a movement would have progressed far more if it had been represented by someone with a more pragmatic view and a modicum of basic social skills, instead of an inflexible, dogmatic, anti-social asshole.

starkd 4y ago
Was that really necessary? Like him or not, he is still somewhat of a legend. For all those denigrating someone as being too old, they might look in the mirror. You will end up "too old" one day too. And faster than you think.
- rhapsodic 4y ago
- KennyBlanken 4y ago
  Nothing in my comment "denigrates RMS for being too old." Lacking any form of social grace or interpersonal skills to the point that he picks and eats his toe-cheese while on-stage for a speaking engagement, being a serial sexual harasser and general pest of women (including telling multiple college-age women that if they don't date him he'd kill himself) to the point that all the women in his office kept substantial houseplant collections in their offices because he hates houseplants, and being unable to even shut his mouth about how 'really, age is just a number' when it comes to sex with kids, and becomes extremely petulant about it when everyone objects to those views... ...is not "denigrating someone as being too old."
  - Koshkin 4y ago
    > twenty years ago... college-age women That's literally saying "too old."

kazinator 4y ago

If we were were to identify what GCC needs most, do you necessarily want RMS on that task? There are enough people that someone else can work on what GCC needs most, while RMS hacks on a manual. GCC is a bloated mess with 50+ megabyte back-end executables; in my opinion, what it needs most is to go on some kind of diet.

jolmg 4y ago

> 30 years late to the party. Why 30 years late? Their earlier manual[1] already covers the C language as standardized 20 years ago with C99. This new one makes mention of at least C11. If it doesn't include features of a later standard, it's at most like 10 years late if you can expect anyone to write a publication like this in a single year. > in a format that is inaccessible to anyone just casually browsing the web but needs to be built using 40+ year old build systems Nothing wrong with software being old. It's stable and reliable. Also, I'm not sure the format has any competition, taking into account feature parity. [1] https://www.gnu.org/software/gnu-c-manual/gnu-c-manual.html https://www.gnu.org/software/gnu-c-manual/gnu-c-manual.html

tjr 4y ago
So one remark with respect to being late to the party and writing a publication like this in a single year... I was the main author on that [1] link there. Richard contacted me ten years ago (in January 2012, as I recall) about his new forthcoming book. I ended up helping him with the new book, but I figured that with this new one coming out, no reason to do much more with the one I had written. So indeed, it never got past coverage of C99 and other GCC extensions circa C99. I honestly did not expect that it was going to be ten years before his new book was finished, or I might would have put more work into the one that I started. Oh well! The new one is finally out. :-)
dark-star 4y ago
> This new one makes mention of at least C11 Indeed, I haven't spotted these on my first glance over the document. So yeah, it's probably only 10-15 years late when it comes out. I'm still amazed that RMS is taking C11 into account, I would have guessed he prefered C99 > Nothing wrong with software being old. It's stable and reliable. I'm sure you're having fun driving your old Ford Country Squire, watching television on an old RCA TV set and using a rotary phone to call friends and family ;-) Of course you are right in that there is nothing inherently wrong with using old software. And yes, it might be more stable than the shiniest newest tech. But there are middle grounds that exist as well that get you nifty features or quality-of-life improvements, and don't intimidate newcomers that much than having to first find out what that CVS is that GNU is still using in some areas ;-)

mhh__ 4y ago

If it keeps him away from the rest of GCC then it's good for GCC. Harsh but realistic.

JJMcJ 4y ago

Make, tex, dvipdf, makeinfo? Still in active use.

cies 4y ago

> is this really what GCC needs most Nah. It's what some programmers need most, especially those that cannot/willnot pirate a manual, or want to be able to give back improvements as they study it.

deanmen 4y ago

It is possible to convert the TexInfo file to a PDF

deanmen 4y ago

It's a standard TeX file built using the GNU texinfo macros, it can be converted to a PDF using TeX or a HTML, docbook, or GNU info page using `makeinfo`

1vuio0pswjnm7 4y ago

Perl is used to convert texi files to html, plaintext, pdf, etc.^1 How to get the perl script for coverting texi On Linux install texinfo On BSD install text2html Below is a tiny script to make this manual as a 639K text file called "c.txt" to read with less(1) and edited with vi(1), according to personal preferences.^2 Your preferences may differ. We may be different people using different computers and different software. 1. https://www.nongnu.org/texi2html/ https://www.nongnu.org/texi2html/ https://texfaq.org/FAQ-texinfo https://texfaq.org/FAQ-texinfo 2. Example personal preferences: Avoid git where it's not needed. Use links browser to dump html to text. Indent text at least 4 spaces, leave large right margins (here, column width = 70). Use curl only for HN examples. IRL, use tnftp. #!/bin/sh set -v; x0=c-intro-and-ref.git; x1=https://git.savannah.nongnu.org/cgit/; test -d $x0||mkdir $x0;cd $x0||exit; for x2 in Makefile c.texi cpp.texi fdl.texi fp.texi texinfo.tex;do echo url=$x1$x0/plain/$x2; echo output=$x2; echo user-agent=\"\"; done|curl -K/dev/stdin -s; case $(uname) in :) ;;*BSD) texi2html --no-headers --no-split --html c.texi ;;Linux) makeinfo --no-headers --no-split --html c.texi esac; links -width 70 -dump .html \ |sed '/^ *Link:/d;/^ *\*/s/\*//;s/^/ /;/Jump to: /{N;N;d;}' > c.txt; # personal preference: uninstall perl to conserve space; exec less c.txt;

1vuio0pswjnm7 4y ago
s/text2html/texi2html/

tbodt 4y ago

All GNU documentation is written in this format. But here they seem to have neglected the standard procedure of converting to HTML before publishing...