Who controls glibc? [LWN.net]

Who controls glibc?

Posted May 8, 2018 23:13 UTC (Tue) by nilsmeyer (guest, #122604)
In reply to: Who controls glibc? by k8to
Parent article: Who controls glibc?

I think the term "unprofessional" should really only be applied in a professional context - meaning you are actually getting paid to do the work. It's not a standard that should apply to a free software project.

It would probably have been best to just leave it alone in the first place since it's really not productive which I would see as a better standard. I'm not implying the original author of the commit wanted to "stir to the pot" so to speak, but often it's very easy to under-estimate the waves this makes. I'd say this debate may end up hurting a lot more than the joke.

to post comments

Who controls glibc?

Posted May 9, 2018 8:46 UTC (Wed) by smcv (subscriber, #53363) [Link] (3 responses)

"Professional" is a shorthand for the behavioural norms you'd (hope to) find in professional employment. The reason for those norms is that in contexts where individuals are perceived to be representing a group, the behaviour of the individual affects outsiders' perception of the group, even if the individual doesn't intend it to. The group might be their employer, but it might also be their profession in general (for instance software engineers), or the Free Software movement, or the glibc team, or GNU, or whatever other group they seem to be representing at the time.

Not all aspects of "professional" behaviour are necessarily required or appropriate everywhere, but the general concept seems transferrable. For instance, if I'm interacting with someone on behalf of Debian, I should be polite, so that they won't go away thinking "Debian people are rude".

There's a time and a place to draw attention to US government policies, but I don't think the glibc reference manual is it. If GNU manuals make political points about Free Software, that's at least a relevant topic (although reference documentation about particular functions wouldn't seem like a great place for that, and indeed the political parts of GNU manuals tend to be in their own section), but political points about topics unrelated to software seem like something that should be elsewhere - both for the benefit of the glibc manual (a greater proportion of relevant text) and for the benefit of the political point being made (more visible to people who don't routinely read the glibc manual).

Having pseudo-legalistic disclaimers in a reference manual for the sake of political satire also seems inadvisable if the writer wants readers to take *actual* legal disclaimers seriously. (See also Firefox's "This might void your warranty!" warning on entering about:config in the en_US locale, which has been criticized for undermining the rather important point that Firefox specifically doesn't have a warranty; the en_GB localization to "Here be dragons!" seems a lot better, since it's more obviously a whimsical phrasing of a general admonition to be careful.)

Who controls glibc?

Posted May 9, 2018 18:03 UTC (Wed) by Tet (subscriber, #5433) [Link] (2 responses)

"Professional" is a shorthand for the behavioural norms you'd (hope to) find in professional employment.

The problem is, those norms vary wildly depending on your location and environment. What is acceptable in my workplace is almost certainly very different to what is acceptable in yours.

Who controls glibc?

Posted May 9, 2018 20:28 UTC (Wed) by k8to (guest, #15413) [Link]

The problem I encounter very often is that this term is frequently poorly. Often, I hear it when the real complaint is very unclear, or when the complainant is really using it as a form of proxy bullying in situations where it's easy to imply unreasonable intent. Even when used in totally reasonable situations, it doesn't get to the point of saying what's wrong specifically, so the target of the complaint may not have any chance to learn from it.

It's not so much that the term is fundamentally bad, but it's often better to dig down one layer to more specifically what norm or expectation has been transgressed. It skips opportunity for misunderstanding, and limits space for crypto-bullying.

Who controls glibc?

Posted May 19, 2018 4:17 UTC (Sat) by gus3 (guest, #61103) [Link]

But another meaning of "professional" is that someone has put a thing on their résumé, looking for "professional" employment. That thing could be a major or minor contribution to a GNU project, something that a prospective employer might look up in Google, DuckDuckGo, Yahoo, or any number of sites that do background checks.

In that sense, the abort() commentary won't exactly look nice to someone looking for "professional" IT/sysadmin employment.