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That's silly. You can have strlcat() and strlcpy(), yet be compatibleThat's silly. You can have strlcat() and strlcpy(), yet be compatiblePosted May 23, 2009 9:22 UTC (Sat) by nix (subscriber, #2304)In reply to: That's silly. You can have strlcat() and strlcpy(), yet be compatible by liljencrantz Parent article: EGLIBC: Not a fork, but a glibc distribution
Drepper is an exceptional project leader when it comes to technical aspectsFor the record I consider this incorrect. He's an excellent hacker and virtually everything he implements is a sort of glittering jewel, perfectly designed (and perfectly undocumented and he has a habit of ignoring contributions of documentation). He'd make an excellent contributor. But unfortunately that is not his role in glibc. Maintainers' roles are higher-level, and there is where Ulrich's bad side comes out. He drops subsystems that he thinks are rarely used or that relate to architectures he merely finds unpleasant (e.g. MIPS, ARM) without listening to anyone pointing out that he might be wrong and without saying why; more than once he's rejected contributions, implemented them nearly identically himself some time later and credited himself alone in NEWS (I suspect anyone working in academe decided never to go near glibc again when that happened for the first time); he mostly refuses to give rationales for technical rejections so that people can fix whatever was wrong with their patches. Whether this is because he's scared of being convinced otherwise or just arrogant I have no idea... but can you imagine what would happen to the kernel, say, if it was run that way? 90% of the useful stuff we now have, maybe more, would simply not be there. He's such a hard maintainer to deal with that an entire mailing list was created whose sole reason for existence was that it was somewhere where people could talk about glibc without Ulrich growling at them every five minutes for 'abusing' libc-alpha@ by, uh, discussing alpha releases of glibc on it. I have never seen *that* in any other project. Developers can be in a project to scratch their own itch: but I think glibc is proof that large free software project maintainers need other goals too. First and foremost I think they have to be driven by a desire to make software that others can hack on easily and that does what users want, and in both of these areas Ulrich falls down like a lead balloon (especially when you note that glibc's users are random developers, and we've seen how he treats them when they dare to ask for help with one of his glibc-only totally-undocumented public APIs).
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That's silly. You can have strlcat() and strlcpy(), yet be compatible Posted May 23, 2009 10:15 UTC (Sat) by liljencrantz (subscriber, #28458) [Link]
I think it's a pretty sane model to make the mainline version of a project only handle a small number of architectures, and force people who use rare architectures to create a «portable version». This means the maintainer doesn't have to be an expert on 20 different wonky architectures, and cleanly separates the responsibility of portability from the responsibility of development. This is what e.g. the OpenSSH people do.
As to dropping good patches and then reimplementing them himself while taking full credit, I had not heard such accusations before. Do you have any specific patch set in mind, something to validate this?
That's silly. You can have strlcat() and strlcpy(), yet be compatible Posted May 23, 2009 11:51 UTC (Sat) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
I'll have to dig it up. It didn't happen often and it was years and years
ago: I dithered about including it. It's not the real problem, to me: maybe he changed his mind and forgot the original contribution had ever existed, which is fine. The real problem is his attitude to contributions.
Rare architectures Posted May 24, 2009 10:06 UTC (Sun) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091) [Link] I'm sorry, but ARM is not a "rare" architecture. It is #4 for Debian, and would rate #3 if arm and armel were counted together.
Rare architectures Posted May 24, 2009 11:45 UTC (Sun) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
More generally, there are more ARMs made than any other processor by a
considerable margin. It's only 'rare' if you ignore the embedded space completely.
That's silly. You can have strlcat() and strlcpy(), yet be compatible Posted May 23, 2009 12:06 UTC (Sat) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
Lest this seem pointlessly nasty I think the emerging de-facto split is
pretty much ideal: it leaves Ulrich and a few others to do technical wizardly in the alleged 'upstream' where they don't have to do anything hard like interact with human beings, and everyone else can go to eglibc, where all the contributions from everyone else and all the stuff people need to actually build a glibc for the distributions (other than RH) can be added on.
This is in effect the split that has long existed anyway: it's only that
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