OpenIndiana lead Alasdair Lumsden resigns [LWN.net]

OpenIndiana lead Alasdair Lumsden resigns

Posted Sep 6, 2012 10:45 UTC (Thu) by schily (guest, #60311)
In reply to: OpenIndiana lead Alasdair Lumsden resigns by nix
Parent article: OpenIndiana lead Alasdair Lumsden resigns

People like you are responsible for the bad taste Linux has in the public.

Attacking people for a bug description is more than a fauxpas....
Doing this with a non-personalized nick is even worse.

BTW: this was different before aprox. 2004. Before that time Linux people generally have been very polite and helpful. Since then there are so many unfriendly people that these people unfortunately dominate the rest in the public.

Looking at your reply shows that you don't know what you are talking of.

- If you like to associate -R with an environment, it is LD_RUN_PATH.
DT_RPATH does not exist.

- Linux uses the old runtime linker that was written for a.out
This is why linker-caching and path setup exist. ELF has a RUNPATH
property that is better than the method in the old a.out system.

- It may be that recent libtool versions are better, but there is too much
software out that uses non-working versions

- It seems that you just know too few things about GNU autoconf.
Knowing that it is based on m4 is not sufficient to understand that
the documentation from the FSF in how to use it is based on outdated
technologies from the 1970s.

- Using "configure" to create something like config.h (as done in the
schily makfile system) is OK

- It seems that Paul Smith copied the ideas for a more modern
autodependency handling from Sun's ideas and implementations in
SunPro make from 1986 and from the Schily makefilesystem that
implemented this method in a portable way in the 1990s. He however
implemented the support in a gmake in a buggy way as gmake spits out
warnings for things that are expected due to his strange algorithm.

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OpenIndiana lead Alasdair Lumsden resigns

Posted Sep 6, 2012 13:04 UTC (Thu) by mpr22 (subscriber, #60784) [Link]

It may be that recent libtool versions are better, but there is too much software out that uses non-working versions

That's not an argument for claiming that libtool is bad. That's an argument for claiming that the software that uses bad versions of libtool is bad (and I will cheerfully admit that there's a lot of badly maintained software out there that, if it runs on anything except Linux, does so only by serendipity).

ELF has a RUNPATH property that is better than the method in the old a.out system.

And the GNU dynamic linker, used on Linux, supports it.

OpenIndiana lead Alasdair Lumsden resigns

Posted Sep 8, 2012 16:08 UTC (Sat) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

Oh gods, this is hilarious. Unintentionally, of course, but still.

Let's go down your fun little list one by one, as far as it is worth it to go.

- DT_RPATH does exist. It is the name of the ELF dynamic tag that is used to implement various linkers' RPATH flags. (It sucks because it wires paths into binaries in a way that is impossible to override without binary editing: DT_RUNPATH sucks slightly less, but still wires paths into binaries, which is less than good).

- The glibc runtime linker was rewritten from scratch for ELF support. It doesn't support a.out, and never has. Linker caching exists because it provides a huge speedup over searching at runtime; its search path exists to allow that to be customized; and RUNPATH is a mild abomination, as you would immediately realize if you had ever had a binary with a runpath that had a path baked into it (often a build path) which was pointing to an NFS server that had become unavailable. I've used Solaris for many, many years, and believe me the number of bugs we had reported that were attributable to mis-set LD_LIBRARY_PATHs (which were *all supposed to have the same value* and which on Linux would just have been set in /etc/ld.so.conf) was simply astonishing.

The rest of your comment is as far as I can tell pure ad hominems, arguments from authority, and straw man attacks, not worthy of a response. ("based on outdated technologies from the 1970s", I'll bet if I ask the actual authors, the only people who might know, they would disagree.)