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Ryan Gordon Ends FatELF Universal Binary Effort

recoiledsnake writes "A few years after the Con Kolivas fiasco, the FatELF project to implement the 'universal binaries' feature for Linux that allows a single binary file to run on multiple hardware platforms has been grounded. Ryan C. Gordon, who has ported a number of popular games and game servers to Linux, has this to say: 'It looks like the Linux kernel maintainers are frowning on the FatELF patches. Some got the idea and disagreed, some didn't seem to hear what I was saying, and some showed up just to be rude.' The launch of the project was recently discussed here. The FatELF project page and FAQ are still up."

12 of 549 comments (clear)

  1. Re: whatever by colinnwn · · Score: 1, Troll

    I don't agree with how most of the LKML handled it, but they are a different audience from the rest of the community, perhaps out of necessity, or maybe for the protection of us all. I wish I had troll points for you. Say hi to Mr. Ballmer for me while you are at it.

  2. Re:He needs thicker skin by BitZtream · · Score: 0, Troll

    Not really, he can just go peddle his warez to someone who is more open to ideas.

    Why should anyone subject themselves to dealing with a bunch of assholes to help them make their stuff better?

    Reminds me of my recent MythTV experience ...

    I join the IRC channel for it, ask a question, lay out whats wrong, and then was told repeatedly that I had configured the server wrong and it wasn't accepting connections, even though I said repeatedly that I was able to connect to it from one client but not another so it was unlikely to be a server problem.

    After trying to explain that I had read the wiki, the mailing lists and done a fair amount of googling and already seen the 3 suggestions I kept getting over and over again, I got to the point where I told them to go fuck themselves basically. At which one guy, who hadn't been there earlier listened long enough to ask for the debug output.

    Turns out, low and behold, it was a combination of client configuration error and a bug in the mysql libs that caused it to hang and never report an error.

    A day later, I've dumped MythTV and went back to WMC under Win7. I've lost a few features in the process, but it works on all my hardware and has yet to require me to deal with a bunch of jackasses who are too arrogant to be useful. (With WMC you deal with to ignorant to be useful instead)

    Does anyone care what I run? Of course not, but they've lost potential developer support. Instead of porting my custom extensions to WMC over to work in a MythTV setup and sharing them, I'll just continue to make them work in WMC. I filed the bug on the way out the door so someone else can fix it, but overall the total loss will be on the MythTV end.

    You don't get help by being a jackass to people, regardless of how much better than them you think you are. You see a lot of this in OSS software (not just Linux, as anyone who has dealt with Theo knows). I partially understand, they aren't getting paid, they don't have any motivation to hide their true colors. Well, at least any instant motivation. Turning people away is never a good thing. I would have been happy to donate to the project instead of buying more XBox 360s to use as extenders. Now I'll just get a couple more rather than re-using my existing PCs and donating to the project.

    He doesn't need thicker skin, they need an attitude adjustment. Its a safe bet that he doesn't really care that much. He's obviously not a cluebie, he has some knowledge, and now they won't benefit. The problem isn't his.

    --
    Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
  3. Re:Wait, what does Con Kolivas have to do with thi by icebraining · · Score: 1, Troll

    Tell me how an Apple developer can run a server allowing the client to select the program and it'll download and install the correct version, like Debian repositories. That problem has already been solved, and the solution is better (it also gives you plenty of other features).

    Oh, and closed-source companies can have their own repositories too. Example: http://download.skype.com/linux/repos/debian/

  4. Re:He needs thicker skin by jedidiah · · Score: 0, Troll

    No. But I can be bothered to do some Google searches and a little bit of troubleshooting on my own.

    This is no worse than what Windows would (and has) subject me to.

    This joker that thinks of himself as a "developer" couldn't be bothered to sort out his own self-inflicted client configuration issue.

    On the one hand, the relevant database is a pain to deal with sometimes. On the other, it is at least built and installed with some security in mind.

    There are turnkey distros for this. Did he try one?

    --
    A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
  5. More Sense by omb · · Score: 0, Troll

    Do you realize that this is not 'statify' or something, this proposal is to put i686, 86_64, Power ... binaries into one ELF file and have the OS binary loader pick the right one. I know disk space is cheap but this is plainly the dumbest idea ever.

    There are lots of ways to package an install script and a set of individual binaries, including NON ELF, in the same package. Further it does nothing about pre- and co- requisites and .so object versioning.

    So I am not surprised that he got a hard time on LKML.

    I am also getting very tired of the _kernel_developers_are_rude_ meme, they are not, and are usually very helpful, but idiotic arguments, defense of patches that cause regressions, untested code can quickly change that. Sometimes even very experienced developers, like all of us at one time or another, loose perspective and loose the big picture. If you are a shrinking violet, fixated eg Larry McVoy, or plain confused do something else or listen to advice.

  6. Re:Bloat-ELF by OrangeTide · · Score: 0, Troll

    Fat binaries are still smaller than the bloated .jar nightmare that Java creates. And we have real world examples of where fat binaries work, on OSX. Adding 300K or so to a package instead of having two or three different versions of a file saves disk space because a pretty large percentage of people just mirror everything they see (packrat human behavior).

    The data files don't need to be duplicated just the executables and libraries. And what is even nicer is that fat binaries let you strip the extraneous crap off your binaries to save disk space, if you so choose.

    Being a person who has to maintain cross-compile tools for multiple architectures and point different people to different shared directories for those tools has me wishing for some real fat binary support on Linux. Maybe it isn't useful to a Java lover like yourself, but frankly it's bullshit that you think your way is the only way to do development. And that kind of attitude one of the many reasons system programmers don't like Java/.NET programmers.

    --
    “Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
  7. Re:I sympathize with you. by ckaminski · · Score: 0, Troll

    That's because people are getting sick of the stupid "Documents and Settings" and "My Documents". Yah, no shit, I made them, OF COURSE THEY'RE MINE!

    Grrrr. The dude who came up with "\Program Files" and not "\Apps" needs to be shot. Preferably one tiny little appendage at a time.

  8. Re:I sympathize with you. by iroll · · Score: 0, Troll

    Wow! Rage, hysteria, and I think you actually got some flecks of spittle on me through the internet!

    I quipped that developing good and useful software would be the same as fighting Microsoft.

    Motive aside, they are the same thing. If you make better and more useful software than MS does, people will use it (Firefox over IE, iTunes over WMP).

    In conclusion: NO U

    --
    Repetition does not transform a lie into the truth. - FDR
  9. Re:BS: "tip of the iceberg" by jcr · · Score: 0, Troll

    But we're discussing Linux here, not some proprietary OS. If you want foo, you 'aptitude install foo' and it just works. If it doesn't you build it yourself and it just works. ...and linux weenies wonder why users don't drop Windows and flock to Linux in droves.

    -jcr

    --
    The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
  10. Re:He needs thicker skin by Grishnakh · · Score: 0, Troll

    Obviously, you're a younger person who lives in his parents' basement and has no social life.

    Those of us who are married, and don't live in basements, prefer to watch video files on something called a "TV" (these days basically a very large medium-res monitor with an ATSC tuner built in), which is in front of something called a "sofa" or "couch", and is controlled by a handheld device called a "remote control". To watch video files on this, we either need to connect a laptop computer to the TV (which is a pain since you can't control it with a remote), or we need a "media computer" which runs either MythTV, WMC, SageTV, or something similar, and allows us to select programming with a remote control and play it.

    I know this is very different from your lifestyle where you have a bed right next to your computer desk and computer, but please try to understand that not everyone lives in a basement like you.

  11. The rude comment isn't an isolated event by Dudeman_Jones · · Score: 0, Troll

    I remember back when I was trying to make the full switch to linux, and I updated my kernel and drivers and to my surprise my video card had decent drivers out of the box. I went onto the local irc channel to ask if anyone knew anything about it out of curiosity. I think my question was worded something like, "Yea I was impressed, I didn't have to jump through the usual hoops to get my video card working fully this time. It was as easy as when I install Windows." I suddenly found myself being berated by both the chatters and the IRC mod at the time. The one comment that sticks out in my mind was, "You deserve to use Windows." All I was doing was asking a simple damn question, in praise of my latest linux install working out of the box! I can't help but think that this same bigoted mindset helped to doom this fairly admirable project, because after attempting to deal with people such as this, it's not even a stretch for me to imagine some linux flavor's project manager going, "Why would we want to impliment a universal standard with Windows? Micro$oft should just do what we do. Windows is a crappy operating system anyway and if you are trying to enable it's use then you deserve it too."

  12. Re:FAT ELF crossed with Elephant by syousef · · Score: 0, Troll

    A troll with score -1?

    A slashdot community without a sense of humour, that couldn't tell the difference between a troll and a joke to save themselves, and a self-rigthteous twit who likes to lay in the boot.

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