RE: I feel particularly slow [LWN.net]

RE: I feel particularly slow

Posted Aug 27, 2010 16:44 UTC (Fri) by trondmy (subscriber, #28934)
In reply to: I feel particularly slow by felixfix
Parent article: Callaway: The long, sordid tale of Sun RPC, abbreviated somewhat, to protect the [guilty] and the irresponsible

Aside from the fact that others have pointed out about rewrites being painful, there is another fact: until about 2 years ago, nobody in the Linux world actually cared about Sun's TI-RPC implementation.

It was only when people started working on adding IPv6 support to the kernel's RPC implementation that we also started looking into using TI-RPC for the user-space utilities.
Before that, the IPv4-only RPC implementation that is included part of glibc was quite sufficient (although that too is derived from an older Sun implementation, and has had its own separate history of licensing issues).

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RE: I feel particularly slow

Posted Aug 29, 2010 2:22 UTC (Sun) by Duncan (guest, #6647) [Link]

Thanks for that clarification. It explains a bit, as even if it's not a practical issue due to non-assertion, it's hard to imagine the FSF core folks failing to address the issue. But if for most of its life it wasn't particularly critical code anyway, but rather, could be dropped without much worry if worse came to worse, priorities on it could indeed drop as well. Only when it finds a more critical use does priority get high enough to followup and actually get the issue resolved.

It /is/ comforting to read (in Simon Phipps blog, early 2009, in the context of his announcement of the BSD relicensing that ultimately fell thru) that both Debian and Fedora were planning on dropping the code if it wasn't relicensed.

Duncan