Who controls glibc? [LWN.net]

Who controls glibc?

Posted May 7, 2018 19:41 UTC (Mon) by amk (subscriber, #19)
Parent article: Who controls glibc?

Also, the joke is not true and makes the manual inaccurate! There is never, ever, going to be legislation that will make it illegal to describe computer functions named abort(), any more than gun control legislation will affect the usage of database triggers or money-laundering legislation will affect the design of washing machines.

I'm reminded of the controversy long ago over a Linux kernel log message, where the code there was something like if (st->endian == LITTLE_ENDIAN) {printk("fucking Sun blows me");}. I don't care about the swearing, but this message is utterly useless in diagnosing an issue; a better message would be the pedestrian but useful 'wrong endianness in superblock', or whatever it meant.

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Who controls glibc?

Posted May 7, 2018 20:22 UTC (Mon) by lsl (subscriber, #86508) [Link] (3 responses)

That depends, I guess. The "fucking Sun..." message might be unique within the kernel code so a grep brings you right to the correct source location. Strings complaining about unexpected endianness may show up often enough to be useless.

Who controls glibc?

Posted May 7, 2018 22:23 UTC (Mon) by k8to (guest, #15413) [Link] (2 responses)

My very very boring solution to this problem is to ensure that each site where you would emit an error has very minor variations in expression. Usually I try to make this be further information: "wrong endianness encountered in xxx" Here xxx sometimes isn't very user-digestible, but I try to make the first portion of the error as explicitly informative as possible and potentially put the xxx in parenthesis or similar. However, I have been known to use trivially different wording when the xxx approach isn't available.

As a a user, I'd prefer xxx to be some punchy vulgarity, but I think I'm in the minority.

Who controls glibc?

Posted May 14, 2018 21:46 UTC (Mon) by cpitrat (subscriber, #116459) [Link] (1 responses)

Or make __FILE__ and __LINE__ be part of your log ...

Who controls glibc?

Posted May 27, 2018 11:03 UTC (Sun) by k8to (guest, #15413) [Link]

In commercial environments, there's often pressure not to show these "internal details" to users.

Who controls glibc?

Posted May 7, 2018 21:57 UTC (Mon) by mrshiny (guest, #4266) [Link] (1 responses)

"The joke is not true" is not a good excuse for not telling a joke. The joke appears to be based on actual legislation

the Mexico City Policy, also known as the “Global Gag Rule,” .... The law prohibits allocation of U.S. funding to foreign non-governmental organizations that offer abortion services or information about the procedure.

So to explain it more fully, what RMS is saying is that the Gag Rule will be expanded to prevent GNU from telling you about the abort() function or when it should be used.

Obviously it's not literally true. But jokes usually aren't.

Who controls glibc?

Posted Jun 9, 2018 0:42 UTC (Sat) by JanC_ (subscriber, #34940) [Link]

Instead of (or at least in addition to) insisting on that joke in a manual almost nobody reads, maybe he should start promoting SheDecides. ☺