Glibc Steering Committee Dissolves; Switches To Co-Operative Development Model

First time accepted submitter bheading writes "Following years under controversial leadership which, among other things, led to a fork (which was in turn adopted by some of the major distributions) the glibc development process has been reinvented to follow a slightly more informal, community-based model. Here's hoping glibc benefits from a welcome dose of pragmatism."

Comments

Summary

[TheRaven64]

The pissing match between RMS and Drepper that resulted in the steering committee is no longer longer relevant now Drepper has gone to work at Goldman Sachs (something that makes me smile: I can't think of any other company more deserving of him).

Re:Summary

[TrekkieGod]

Ahahaha, really? That's hilarious. Damn, I remember Drepper. I was told "he's quite nice in person", but you'd never know it from how he acted over email.

Heh...I read through the summary and thought, "actually, we could do with less pragmatism and more with just doing what is right regardless of what the people keep requesting. Design by committee is the path to bloat. Then I clicked the links and saw this comment by Drepper in response to a bug report on arm:

It's working fine everywhere but this carp architectures. I'm not going to make the code perform worse just because of Arm. Providing your own copy of that file if you care.

That's not lack of pragmatism, that's lack of professionalism. In fact, this is a good time to point out that "nice in person" is code for "asshole, but too much of a coward to behave like one if the other person is within punching distance."

Re:Summary

[bheading]

When I wrote about pragmatism I was thinking of this problem where a modification to glibc's malloc() implementation broke the Adobe flash player. It is worth contrasting the attitude of Linus Torvalds in that thread with that of the glibc maintainers. I think most reasonable people would agree there is a trade off between supporting broken applications and ensuring things are done right. In this case, it would have cost glibc nothing to make a minor concession.

Re:Summary

[iluvcapra]

Linux Desktop bunch are actually sabotaging Desktop Linux

Is that like the People's Front of Judea and the Judean People's Front?

Re:Summary

[TrekkieGod]

When I wrote about pragmatism I was thinking of this problem where a modification to glibc's malloc() implementation broke the Adobe flash player. It is worth contrasting the attitude of Linus Torvalds in that thread with that of the glibc maintainers. I think most reasonable people would agree there is a trade off between supporting broken applications and ensuring things are done right. In this case, it would have cost glibc nothing to make a minor concession.

I understand your point, that it doesn't break anything else to make the concession. That said, this is exactly what I mean by "we need less pragmatism." The way I see it, overlapping memcpy is a bug, so that's what needed to be fixed. You code according to an API, and the moment that applications start depending on how you implement that API internally, you're asking for trouble. Pragmatically, you'd get flash working, but I'd actually be in favor of leaving the backwards copy in there even if it serves no other purpose than to expose bugs in people's code using your library.

I think doing things the right way is more important than getting things working for now, because it prevents things from breaking in the future. More long term planning and less short-term concessions is the way to go. That said, "this doesn't work at all on arm" problem was an actual bug on glibc's side. If he thinks the new way of doing things hurts performance in other architectures, then he can provide the different code paths with optimizations if he cares to do so.

Re:fork valley

[TheRaven64]

Those are not forks, they are different implementations. The Android libc is based on FreeBSD libc with some tweaks. It does not share code with glibc.

Excessive "modularity" can become hell.

[Anonymous Coward]

Monolithic libraries are the way to go. They make software development much easier.

If you don't believe me, just look at the GNOME project. The last time I tried to build it from scratch by hand, there must have been at least 50 libraries I had to build first. That was several years ago, so there are probably many more that are needed now. Those were just libraries from the GNOME project, too! That's not including glibc, the many X libraries, Gtk+, and so forth! Don't forget that you'll need to start making sure you're using the right versions, too. Some of these libraries are released yearly, while others have a new release every week.

To realistically build something like GNOME, where they went absolutely stupid with unnecessary modularity, you need to use one of the scripts that are out there that'll do it all for you. Those scripts end up being a solution to a problem that shouldn't exist in the first place! They're only needed because what should be one monolithic library was split out into 60 smaller libraries. You'll need all of the libraries to get even a basic GNOME installation up and running, so there's no point in separating them.

It's not the 1980s any longer. We don't statically link everything using dumb linkers that can't strip out unused executable code. Modern OSes using dynamic linking and delayed loading only ever use the parts of libraries that are actually used.

Re:Excessive "modularity" can become hell.

[slashbart]

Amen!
I like Qt's approach with only a couple of large libraries (QtCore, QtGui, QtXml, ...) where each has a very clear usage, and if you don't want graphics you don't use QtGui, but if you do, everything is in QtGui. Here's the list

It's not a fork

[aglider]

It's clearly written in the fery first FAQ:

EGLIBC is not meant to be a fork of GLIBC.

The icon is wrong

[phoxix]

It should be GNU, not Debian. Glibc is very much a GNU project. How do people not know GlibC is a GNU project?

Re:The icon is wrong

[bheading]

The Debian tag is there because they promoted the eglibc fork.

I am not quite sure that glibc is a GNU project. I thought for that to be true, the copyrights would have to be transferred to the FSF. Drepper posted a long rant a while back about how the FSF would do that over his cold, dead body.

Re:Drepper and Theo are great men. Respect them.

[Anonymous Coward]

They are vilified as being "mean" or "intolerant" by some, merely because they point out the foolishness of others in public.

They are vilified as being "mean" or "intolerant" because they act like mean intolerant assholes.

A truly great programmer does not feel the need to belittle others' efforts. A truly great project leader does not feel the need to be rude and dismissive.

Compare Linus Torvalds, who is just as opinionated and can be just as abrupt, and yet somehow manages not to be widely perceived as a mean intolerant asshole. Consider the possibility that this is because he is also frequently observed being polite and saying nice things in public.

Re:Drepper and Theo are great men. Respect them.

[TheRaven64]

Theo and Drepper are very different. Theo is usually technically correct and has no time for people who can't work out why for themselves. Drepper is very often wrong, and is still an asshat in these cases.

Re:Drepper and Theo are great men. Respect them.

[rgbrenner]

When I first started using Linux (about '97).. I emailed Torvalds to say that I thought Linux needed to advertise because a lot of people didn't know it existed. He actually responded and politely explained how the project is put together/why that wasn't going to happen.

Re:Drepper and Theo are great men. Respect them.

[TheRaven64]

Not that have some kind of allegiance to the glibc, but what do all those Linux based GPSs, routers, TVs, etc, not to mention all those servers?

Most embedded users don't use glibc either, they use something like newlib or uclibc, depending on the resource constraints.

For a good laugh

[BlackPignouf]

Read http://sourceware.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=4980 or http://sourceware.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=4403 for a good laugh. /. trolls pale in comparison. :D