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Debian switching to EGLIBCDebian switching to EGLIBCPosted May 6, 2009 14:21 UTC (Wed) by kragil (guest, #34373)Parent article: Debian switching to EGLIBC
Wow, reading those sourceware bugs it seems Ulrich has the last name DEPPer for a reason.(german meaning of Depp is not very nice)
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Debian switching to EGLIBC Posted May 6, 2009 14:34 UTC (Wed) by kragil (guest, #34373) [Link]
Ooops, I overlooked a "r" there. It would have been too fitting anyways :)
Debian switching to EGLIBC Posted May 6, 2009 18:06 UTC (Wed) by ejr (subscriber, #51652) [Link]
Bear in mind that Mr. Drepper not only maintains glibc, he also does a good deal of work on the single-unix specs and on the libc/kernel boundary. When he tells people to pay, that's likely a very poorly worded way of saying: Hire people, 'cause I'm beyond tapped. And if you look into the amount of explanation he gives many items, well, there are only so many hours in the day... Read the papers on his site. They're very, very details and quite lucid.
I'm not saying he couldn't communicate his lack of time a tad more tactfully, but he still deserves respect. Also, I suspect the move to git is meant to make project-local forks easier.
Debian switching to EGLIBC Posted May 6, 2009 21:14 UTC (Wed) by stevenb (guest, #11536) [Link]
I suppose mr. Drepper's technical abilities are not in question. But the choice of words he makes to express his disagreement with others is outright rude. If he were on my pay-roll, I'd fire him for that, regardless of his technical abilities.
Debian switching to EGLIBC Posted May 6, 2009 22:30 UTC (Wed) by alankila (subscriber, #47141) [Link]
I doubt you should. Any sane cost function weighs between costs and benefits. If this guy was worth, say, 100 of your other programmers, perhaps you should tolerate up to 100 times more rudeness in compensation and still count yourself coming ahead.
Not that I know anything of mr. Drepper. This has nothing to do with him.
Debian switching to EGLIBC Posted May 7, 2009 0:56 UTC (Thu) by ofeeley (guest, #36105) [Link]
I'm not so sure that he's as rude as made out either. Choosing just two of the links from the list given which are supposed to show an attitude problem I'm not in agreement. For the first one[1] I initially read it as a bit terse: "this function is a joke [...] don't you have better things to do" until I took a look at the function in question: strfry. It does seem to be possibly a joke, or at least mildly entertaining non-useful function. If there are other higher priority things to patch then it does seem odd to waste developer time on it.
The second instance[2] seems to show people misusing the comment facilities on bugzilla in order to harass the developer.
1. http://sourceware.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=4403
2. http://sourceware.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=4980
Anyway, that's just an outsiders perspective taking a random, lazy look at some of the evidence presented by the prosecution.
Debian switching to EGLIBC Posted May 7, 2009 1:07 UTC (Thu) by jordanb (guest, #45668) [Link]
The guy fixed a bug in it though. Clearly it was important enough to him to do that analysis, and then fix what was wrong. All Drepper had to do is get over himself long enough to apply it.
A friend of mine sent in a patch to Emacs Tetris, to fix a bug that allowed you to cheat. RMS replied with "when you cheat at solitaire, who are you cheating?" but applied the patch anyway. Something like that would have been the proper response.
Anyway, it wasn't the strfry incident that lead Debian to this point, clearly, but more his refusal to accept patches that fixed bugs on ARM on account of it being "crap."
Debian switching to EGLIBC Posted May 7, 2009 1:23 UTC (Thu) by ofeeley (guest, #36105) [Link]
Sounds like fair comment.
Debian switching to EGLIBC Posted May 7, 2009 14:25 UTC (Thu) by Felix.Braun (subscriber, #3032) [Link] The guy fixed a bug in [strfry()] though. Clearly it was important enough to him to do that analysis, and then fix what was wrong. All Drepper had to do is get over himself long enough to apply it. To be fair, if you read the relevant bug report, you'll see that Mr. Drepper fixed the bug in a different way. He even re-fixed his first implementation after that was discovered to be sub-optimal. So, there should be no complaints here.
Debian switching to EGLIBC Posted May 11, 2009 4:31 UTC (Mon) by dirtyepic (subscriber, #30178) [Link]
the complaint is that no one deserves to be severely ridiculed for simply trying to fix a bug. maybe it's the wrong fix, or is truthfully not a bug, but if the only thing that you can hope to accomplish by filing a bug report is public humiliation then why bother.
Debian switching to EGLIBC Posted May 11, 2009 6:04 UTC (Mon) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
Don't forget rescinding a significant contributor's commit access
(forever) and refusing to explain why. That's happened at least once.
Debian switching to EGLIBC Posted May 7, 2009 6:52 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
One random personal example here:
<http://sourceware.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=7065>. A security improvement, marked as 'never going to happen' without reason. (Repeated requests by several people to provide *any* kind of rationale for rejecting a zero-effect-when-compiled-out security improvement went unanswered. Ulrich would be much more tolerable if he said *why* he did what he did occasionally, but he seems to assume everyone else is telepathic.)
Proof that it's a security improvement:
Debian switching to EGLIBC Posted May 7, 2009 10:02 UTC (Thu) by viro (subscriber, #7872) [Link]
FWIW, I'm not fond of Ulrich's style for a lot of reasons, and this case demonstrates one of those nicely. That is to say, "sod off" is not a substitute for a proper LART. And you've earned one in that bug report, by dismissing Petr's reference to -std=c99 with "it can't affect anything".
Oddly enough, it *does* affect something. Such as the output of compiled binary (with stock glibc). Without -std=c99: out: 0x0p-15234. With it:
And a look at strtold(3) shows where the hell had that suggestion come from:
Feature Test Macro Requirements for glibc (see feature_test_macros(7)):
strtof(), strtold(): _XOPEN_SOURCE >= 600 || _ISOC99_SOURCE; or cc -std=c99
Experiment with -D_ISOC99_SOURCE or -D_XOPEN_SOURCE=600 shows the same output as -std=c99. And that output looks a lot saner (10.5 * 2 * 2) than the crap produced without any of those.
I can't be arsed to dig through the macro hell in glibc headers, but that looks suspiciously like compat with some pre-c99 GNUism. Don't know, don't care and _really_ don't want to debug that shite. However, I'm quite certain that by this point you see the reasons for LART as well as I do. For the benefit of the other folks:
1) failure to RTFM
Nix, you *do* know better. The above is more than enough for you to construct quite a lovely verbal clue-by-four of your own, so I'll happily leave that as an exercise for reader.
Debian switching to EGLIBC Posted May 7, 2009 13:50 UTC (Thu) by viro (subscriber, #7872) [Link]
Gyah... And I should've known better than replying while low on caffeine.
My apologies - I've misparsed your reply to Petr, so the idiocy in this case is sure as hell mine.
Debian switching to EGLIBC Posted May 7, 2009 14:38 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
The problem in this case is really that my sentence construction is so baroque that nobody else can understand it, sort of like the glibc makefiles. :)
(And absence of caffeine excuses all!)
Debian switching to EGLIBC Posted May 7, 2009 13:58 UTC (Thu) by k8to (subscriber, #15413) [Link]
Uhm, what? none of that is in the bug entry.
Debian switching to EGLIBC Posted May 7, 2009 5:16 UTC (Thu) by PaulWay (✭ supporter ✭, #45600) [Link]
> Any sane cost function weighs between costs and benefits. If this guy
> was worth, say, 100 of your other programmers, perhaps you should > tolerate up to 100 times more rudeness in compensation and still count > yourself coming ahead.
There are three fallacies with this approach that make it wrong. The first one is the idea that there's some magic number that you can derive that gives you the worth of a person and eir contribution to a specific project or goal. There's a whole sociology course of reasons there, but a simpler one might be that it gets down to the 'mythical man-month' problem - you can't just hire another 100 programmers and make the project go 100 times faster, or even as fast.
Secondly, you're biasing our reactions by picking a large number. If Ulrich is worth 1.1 other programmers, what do you do?
However, what it really comes down to for me is that there are a bunch of groups - programmers, Red Hat, open source enthusiasts - who should just say "no" to antisocial behaviour. Calling people idiots or defining their work as a waste of time should never be excusable. If Ulrich was being sexist, defamatory or racist, would that still be OK (even if he was worth 100 other programmers)? I personally say no.
When we implicitly or explicitly excuse this kind of obnoxious behaviour, we make it acceptable. That to me is just not on. We can hardly say "show me the code" if we then scare everyone off who tries to contribute code. There are plenty of ways to deal with the bug reports that the EGLIBC people link to that would have been polite and helpful but still firm in his opinion and would have taken even less time to do than Ulrich expended on his inflammatory outbursts. We should learn better ways to interact, rather than excuse bad behaviour.
Have fun,
Paul
Debian switching to EGLIBC Posted May 7, 2009 10:06 UTC (Thu) by NAR (subscriber, #1313) [Link]
I think software development is unique in the sense that there are actually people who are 10 times as productive as some of their peers, even in the same workgroup. So probably it's worth to employ a couple of other people who hide the "guru" from the users. Don't forget that people actually have the right to be sexist, defamatory or racist.
Character flaws Posted May 7, 2009 21:55 UTC (Thu) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091) [Link] I still think that PaulWay is right about the first fallacy, but maybe not the way he intended. Sometimes an individual's worth cannot be measured as 100 normal fellows, because sometimes he or she can enable things which were not even feasible before. There is no replacement even with hordes of developers. Think about Science and the contributions of great individuals -- the kind of leap of a Pasteur or a Newton cannot be done by a thousand clever fellows. Engineering is sometimes the same, as is software engineering.About character flaws I think you are quite right. In some contexts buffering the guru is an effective way to dealing with an ill-mannered engineer.
Character flaws Posted May 8, 2009 1:55 UTC (Fri) by PaulWay (✭ supporter ✭, #45600) [Link]
You raise a great point! I think that's another good reason why saying "well, he's a good coder, so he's allowed to annoy other people" is just wrong.
Have fun,
Paul
Debian switching to EGLIBC Posted May 8, 2009 1:54 UTC (Fri) by PaulWay (✭ supporter ✭, #45600) [Link]
> Don't forget that people actually have the right to be sexist, defamatory or racist.
Yeah, right. Try being sexist, defamatory or racist in the workplace and see how your contract covers you. Try being sexist, defamatory or racist on a public internet forum and see how the forum's or your ISP's conditions of use work. Try getting up in a public place and being sexist, defamatory or racist and see how you go with the police.
People have the right to their own thoughts, which I think is where you're coming from. But public behaviour is what's in question here. And I'll bet you a beer that Ulrich's contract with Red Hat allows them to fire him for being sexist, defamatory or racist in public.
And even if there is some specific condition where being sexist, defamatory or racist is allowed, I still reckon it's bad behaviour. I don't care if someone is a thousand times better at coding than anyone else, being rude and obnoxious to other people is bad for that person,for the projects they work for and for the community they're involved in.
So to me it seems pretty counterproductive to hide behind some technical legal argument to excuse behaviour which, as I said originally, is completely unnecessary and caused Ulrich more hassle rather than less.
Have fun,
Paul
Don't be so sure Posted May 8, 2009 18:08 UTC (Fri) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] Yeah, right. Try being sexist, defamatory or racist in the workplace and see how your contract covers you. If you are working for US Company - it'll be written in contract. In other countries it's free right (some European countries are emulation US but to smaller degree). You can be fired if you disrupt the team, but just for being sexist or racist? Puhlease. When our company was bought by US one we had special sessions to explain exactly what natural things (like sexist jokes or jokes about other minorities) we shouldn't do from now on. Everyone agreed that it's idiotic, but hey - these guys are paying me, they establish rules. Try being sexist, defamatory or racist on a public internet forum and see how the forum's or your ISP's conditions of use work. Probably you are visiting totally different forms from me - because I'm seeing sexist, defamatory and racist remarks quite often. And not just from trolls. Again: if we are not talking about US where (as Heinlein noted half-sentury ago) everyone is so proud to point out that they have absolutely nothing against your skin color, face or sexual orientation... Try getting up in a public place and being sexist, defamatory or racist and see how you go with the police. For being sexist? This is a joke. For being defamatory or racist... possibility is there but you need to spend A LOT OF effort to reach this point.
Right of being defamatory? Posted May 11, 2009 11:01 UTC (Mon) by incase (subscriber, #37115) [Link]
Honestly, your freedom of speech ends where you are hurting the dignity of others. You can be an asshole if you want to, but you should not insult others (actually, insulting rather than critizising is a legal offense here)
In Germany, the topmost grant our constitution grants it dignity. Freedom of thought, religion and speech is also in their of course, but it is below the grants for dignity, and some other things like prohibition of discrimination because of race, sex/gender, religion and other things, your right not to be injured in physical or mental well-being etc.
regards,
Debian switching to EGLIBC Posted May 8, 2009 10:46 UTC (Fri) by alankila (subscriber, #47141) [Link]
"The first one is the idea that there's some magic number that you can derive that gives you the worth of a person"
Fair enough. It was a sketch of an argument. I picked a large, round number to make it obvious that I was not serious. What do you think 100 times more rude even means? It doesn't really mean anything.
"Secondly, you're biasing our reactions by picking a large number. If Ulrich is worth 1.1 other programmers, what do you do?"
In the argument, he is allowed to be up to 1.1 times more rude to compensate for technical prowess.
"Calling people idiots or defining their work as a waste of time should never be excusable."
I'll pick on the word "never". Let's take it literally. If a person is an idiot, and the work is waste of time, perhaps it would be good idea to call it such? I don't see what denying reality gets you, other than blinders that cause you to make mistakes.
Debian switching to EGLIBC Posted May 8, 2009 10:53 UTC (Fri) by alankila (subscriber, #47141) [Link]
I already regret the last paragraph. Let's just say that I agree that it's good to be a polite, reasonable person. I just am not so sure that hard-fast rules such as "it's never ok to be rude" are reasonable. I see the matter such: there is a palette of expressions, and every one of these may have its uses.
To skillfully use this palette is completely another matter: it's horribly crude to use wrong kind of expression, and doesn't reflect well on the speaker. Communication is, after all, a process where you need to make yourself understood to another. Whether I just transgressed remains to be seen...
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