Who controls glibc?

Posted May 8, 2018 13:56 UTC (Tue) by lordcheeto (guest, #124253)
In reply to: Who controls glibc? by spacemachine
Parent article: Who controls glibc?

Every open source project has small commits that are just typo fixes, documentation updates, etc. from people that happened to stumble upon it. Often from people that have never submitted a patch or pull request before, as appears to be the case here. It gets their feet wet. It introduces them to the community and their contribution guidelines.

This is a good thing.

Who controls glibc?

Posted May 8, 2018 18:36 UTC (Tue) by spacemachine (guest, #124210) [Link] (7 responses)

This was not a typo. This was a clear contradiction of the instructions that were in the source code. Everyone knew they were disobeying a request by RMS. An innocent first time contributor wouldn't do this. The contributor had an agenda from the beginning.

Who controls glibc?

Posted May 8, 2018 18:54 UTC (Tue) by sfeam (subscriber, #2841) [Link] (6 responses)

Now you've gone off the deep end. Every sentence in your last post is untrue (well, except for the "not a typo"). But you know what? It doesn't matter. The issue remains not the fate of a stupid joke but the question of whether RMS does or does not have veto authority over a decision made by the development team. Whether this issue was exposed unintentionally or through deliberate provocation, it's now out in the open.

Who controls glibc?

Posted May 8, 2018 20:17 UTC (Tue) by spacemachine (guest, #124210) [Link] (5 responses)

You can feign ignorance but diff doesn't lie, it was provocation. 1000 things fo fix about glibc but instead the lines with clear instructions to leave alone were targetted. When patches with the purpose of provocation start to surface, it's the beginning of the end. RMS should fire all of them.

Request #2

Posted May 8, 2018 20:18 UTC (Tue) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link] (4 responses)

I'll repeat: we get it. We know how you feel about all of this. Now would be a good time to stop posting these, please.

Request #2

Posted May 8, 2018 20:50 UTC (Tue) by spacemachine (guest, #124210) [Link] (3 responses)

Separate question, why am I being asked to stop when it's other people that keep responding to me and ignoring my points? Why does it matter how many comments there are?

Request #2

Posted May 8, 2018 21:14 UTC (Tue) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link] (2 responses)

It is my wish for everybody to stop this particular back-and-forth, not just you. But, of the 111 comments on this article (as of this writing) 22 — a full 20% — were written by you. That suggests that you're the one driving this particular cycle; if you stop, I suspect that most others will as well. Though somebody will inevitably respond to one of your comments; I hope you'll be able to let that slide.

"Number of comments" is not necessarily a problem, but large numbers of repetitive comments can only drown out the signal in the conversation overall.

Calling supporters of this change "malicious" is also heading into personal attack territory, which is not something we want here.

You are not unique in any of the above, but you stood out enough to make you an obvious intervention point when I wanted to calm things down in general. I appreciate your willingness to respect that request.

(Incidentally, I almost didn't write this article at all out of fear for what the comment stream could be. It has not come even close to what we had imagined; for that we are grateful to everybody involved.)

Request #2

Posted May 8, 2018 22:19 UTC (Tue) by andresfreund (subscriber, #69562) [Link]

> (Incidentally, I almost didn't write this article at all out of fear for what the comment stream could be. It has not come even close to what we had imagined; for that we are grateful to everybody involved.)

I think that's a complicating factor. But I still appreciate the article. Sometimes I wonder if this kind of article couldn't stand having comments disabled. Or at least rate-limited to one an hour or such.

Request #2

Posted Nov 8, 2018 17:03 UTC (Thu) by deepfire (guest, #26138) [Link]

Jonathan, I think the topic touches an interesting phenomenon that runs deep in our society.

There are people who abhor the increasing influence that political correctness has on the freedom of expression, and so are extremely sensitive on any infringement -- in a way that is not entirely dissymmetric with how the people representing the political correctness side feel.

This is a profound issue, there is no mistake. And while I appreciate that formally the topic of the article is elsewhere, I'm sure we'll be back to discuss it again and again. I don't think it's really useful to try fighting the wind in this case..

That said, this is your forum, Jonathan, and I appreciate all the work you have put into it over the years!