On breaking things

On breaking things

Posted Nov 26, 2010 19:09 UTC (Fri) by giraffedata (subscriber, #1954)
In reply to: On breaking things by mrshiny
Parent article: On breaking things

I just feel that it's not the right position for a library maintainer to take, especially the single most important library in the whole system.

But let's not attribute more responsibility to Drepper than he really has. One of the reasons a distributor of free software has the privilege of defining what is Not His Problem is that anyone who disagrees is free to do better. The article makes this point in noting that it is Fedora, not the Glibc project, that is distributing a problematic library, and Fedora is accepting that responsibility and discussing whether to distribute the old or new memcpy behavior.

And, according to the article, the people arguing in favor of distributing the new memcpy behavior aren't doing so based on principle, like Drepper, but based on the belief that giving better performance to a wide range of users over the long term is better than making Flash work for some users in the short term.

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