Debian switching to EGLIBC

Posted May 7, 2009 0:56 UTC (Thu) by ofeeley (guest, #36105)
In reply to: Debian switching to EGLIBC by alankila
Parent article: Debian switching to EGLIBC

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] (4 responses)

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 (guest, #3032) [Link] (2 responses)

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 (guest, #30178) [Link] (1 responses)

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] (4 responses)

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:
<http://sourceware.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=7066>. A buffer overrun,
analysis ignored. Who knows why, at least he didn't say 'never going to
happen' about this one.

Debian switching to EGLIBC

Posted May 7, 2009 10:02 UTC (Thu) by viro (subscriber, #7872) [Link] (3 responses)

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:
out: 0xa.8p+2.

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
2) dismissing relevant "did you have $FOO in arguments?" with "oh, it can't matter at all"
3) failure to RTFM even after that (if nothing else, to see WTF had that question been about)
4) reporting nasal daemons as security hole, instead of (if I've parsed that bug report correctly) some crap somewhere in the clusterfsck of makefiles around glibc testsuite, either present in the original or introduced by yourself.
5) refering to the entire sad story as to evidence of security hole found by proposed patch.

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] (1 responses)

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 (guest, #15413) [Link]

Uhm, what? none of that is in the bug entry.