LWN: Comments on "A "joke" in the glibc manual"

A "joke" in the glibc manual

ceving — Wed, 08 Jul 2020 13:16:32 +0000

For many, including me, it is a little hard to understand why there is any opposition to removing the joke at all. It is clearly out of place, not particularly funny, and doesn't really push the GNU anti-censorship philosophy forward in any real way even if you grant that anti-censorship is a goal of the project (which some do not).

This sounds right.

But consider this: I have never read about the Global Gag Rule. An article about RMS brought me to this article. And a few clicks further I have read the Wikipedia article about Global Gag Rule.

So the joke created a controversy. The controversy created an article about the controversy. The article got referenced by others. And in the end a reader like me knows the Global Gag Rule.

You have to admit: the joke pushed many things.

Code Politics

Garak — Mon, 17 Dec 2018 08:31:26 +0000

Whether or not it's funny seems relevant as far as how many people choose to go with that particular branch/fork/implementation vs an alternate one. Code choice is way more political and importantly so than is often implied by the mainstream media covering the issue.

Overstanding Pro-Choice

tao — Tue, 11 Dec 2018 11:11:51 +0000

Whether or not it's funny doesn't really feel relevant, to be honest. I don't read manual pages for jokes,
there are plenty of better sources for such.

Overstanding Pro-Choice

Garak — Sat, 08 Dec 2018 08:06:15 +0000

For many, including me, it is a little hard to understand why there is any opposition to removing the joke at all.

Though you wrote a significant article on the issue, I can only advise- "dwell on it more". It shouldn't be that hard to understand _any_ opposition. Really.

It is clearly out of place,

I call B.S. The person who put it there in the first place thought it fit there.

not particularly funny

clearly not particularly funny to you is clearly not the same thing as clearly not particularly funny to anyone.

and doesn't really push the GNU anti-censorship philosophy forward in any real way even if you grant that anti-censorship is a goal of the project

Oh, au contrair, I'd have to say the article you wrote about it is proof that its existence furthered pushing that philosophy, using you as an instrument. Imagine how much more visibility the philosophy has now, than a year ago. This scenario I consider a wonderful display of the liberty of F(L)OSS. For goodness sake, if anybody cares enough they can fork, call it mylibc, and allow any others who share the preference to follow their fork. I think the real issue is that people were under the illusion that there was some magical democracy-like community in charge of glibc, when in fact it's a (debatably optimal/malignant/benign) dictator. And the related issue of certain F(L)OSS factions that see many slightly differing forks and competition and _choice_ among them as net-negative due to userbase confusion, instead of net-positive due to maximal choice for the userbase.

Let's stop here, please

corbet — Mon, 19 Nov 2018 21:08:06 +0000

This is increasingly off-topic for LWN; perhaps this particular discussion could be moved elsewhere if it really needs to continue?

Thanks.

A "joke" in the glibc manual

mathstuf — Mon, 19 Nov 2018 18:47:26 +0000

It's an observation that those who call themselves "pro-life" for a fetus tend to also complain about things like social welfare to help those who have gone through with the birth actually raise the newborn.

A "joke" in the glibc manual

Yui — Mon, 19 Nov 2018 18:17:17 +0000

I suppose you mean "begins" instead of "ends". But this fundamental difference is why people who are against abortion and those support it don't and never will see eye to eye. Personally I think the life begins well before the child is born.

A "joke" in the glibc manual

nix — Mon, 19 Nov 2018 13:42:25 +0000

God, I'm glad that's not true. I'd be a murderer by proxy at least. (I arguably crowded out my identical twin, though he didn't actually die until after he was born, an action done by conscious choice of medical staff and parents which I completely agree with even though it *was* technically probably murder: he could have been kept alive indefinitely but would likely never have regained consciousness and would have had a dreadful quality of life even if he had. It's the sort of edge case that makes the law scream, but frankly it is better that I live for him. Even more horrifying is what happens to twins sharing a placenta if one twin dies in utero -- do you prosecute the twin that died first for murder after it in effect vampirically sucks the other twin's entire blood supply into its own body, on account of not having a working heart to pump it out again? Parasitic necromurder! Biology is often horrible and does not care about our legal niceties.)

A "joke" in the glibc manual

jezuch — Mon, 19 Nov 2018 13:38:49 +0000

That's... how (us) (computer?) nerds roll. If something is not 0/1 black/white, discuss increasingly minute minutia until it is. I hate it too sometimes.

A "joke" in the glibc manual

pizza — Mon, 19 Nov 2018 11:41:23 +0000

>That actually makes me worry whether a significant part of the "pro-life" crowd is merely in the business of inventing twisted definitions of what life is in order to make women lives miserable.

Punishing women is usually the primary intention, and occasionally you see it explicitly stated as such. After all, the pregnancy is proof positive that the woman "sinned" -- and any suffering she experiences as a result is not only (obviously richly) deserved, but that any sort of social assistance for said mothers would be rewarding her for her sins.

Consequently, there's a substantial overlap between political pro-lifery [1] and those who are actively trying to dismantle the social safety net that is often the only thing keeping these mothers and their "every life is sacred" new babies from being kicked to the curb. (It seems that "life" is only sacred when it's in foetal form, and said sacredness ceases the moment it pops out of its mother. Similarly, the mother's "life" is only sacred when it's carrying said fetus within it)

I do find this attitude rather curious, given that the lion's share of pro-lifers [1] claim to follow a religion that was founded by an individual they claim was born out of wedlock, and whose highly revered mother suffered all manner of depredations as a result.

Okay, this is _way way way_ off topic. I'll shut up now.

[1] In my country. I can't comment on how this plays out elsewhere.

A "joke" in the glibc manual

lkundrak — Mon, 19 Nov 2018 05:43:40 +0000

> It ends another life.

So does many people's lunch. And that would be a self-sustaining life, unlike that of a fetus.

That actually makes me worry whether a significant part of the "pro-life" crowd is merely in the business of inventing twisted definitions of what life is in order to make women lives miserable.

A side note: the free software community doesn't usually seem to care either. I remember that Seth Vidal objected addition of a meat joke to Yum (which he maintained), but nobody seems to have seriously protested the whole "Fedora Beefy Miracle" joke.

A "joke" in the glibc manual

Cyberax — Mon, 19 Nov 2018 02:23:59 +0000

So if the fetus is a life then fetus could be sued for aggravated battery, sex crimes and harassment at least.

A "joke" in the glibc manual

pizza — Mon, 19 Nov 2018 02:07:35 +0000

> Well, abortion concerns more than just the woman's body and life. It ends another life.

In practice, the significance/importance of that "another life" ends the moment that life is actually born.

A "joke" in the glibc manual

Yui — Mon, 19 Nov 2018 01:05:56 +0000

What collateral damage are you talking of exactly?

A "joke" in the glibc manual

Yui — Mon, 19 Nov 2018 01:04:31 +0000

>Her body,her life

Well, abortion concerns more than just the woman's body and life. It ends another life.

Global Gag Rule

Wol — Sun, 18 Nov 2018 20:59:05 +0000

> Congress has no power to make laws for non-citizens outside US territory,

So how come UK citizens have been extradited to, charged, and imprisoned, in the US for crimes against US law, which were perfectly legal when they were committed *in the UK*.

Cheers,
Wol

A "joke" in the glibc manual

ledow — Fri, 16 Nov 2018 09:13:05 +0000

I am far more concerned about the time wasted DISCUSSING whether something is suitable on not, when those people could be coding instead.

Literally, this would be a "sigh, okay... people are upset, and this serves literally no purpose whatsoever... it takes two seconds to revert it without affecting anything whatsoever, or we can discuss it for weeks on end... <applies patch to remove it>. Done. Real work now?"

A "joke" in the glibc manual

Wol — Thu, 15 Nov 2018 18:21:14 +0000

> It takes ownership of the opinion, and declares an intention and desire to follow a particular path that is known to be welcome, without suggesting that anyone else is required to make the same choice.

Which is why the linux raid wiki editing guidelines state pretty much "please write in the *first* person and take *personal* responsibility for what you write".

Imho there's far too much emphasis on third-person impersonal writing that takes responsibility for nothing. (Plus 1st-person is much nicer to read :-)

Cheers,
Wol

A "joke" in the glibc manual

dalias — Thu, 15 Nov 2018 17:01:30 +0000

If this is really the case, please don't reimplement the functionality in applications, but rather make a report of exactly what is slow, ideally in terms of bad typical or worst cases in real usage rather than just microbenchmarks.

A "joke" in the glibc manual

marcH — Thu, 15 Nov 2018 15:02:31 +0000

If you're actually interested in the answers to your question (I doubt it) jut try to read what most other people wrote. You won't agree with any of it but make at least a genuine effort to understand bits of what others think.

I'm tired of the one-sided political baloney in too many discussions here

HelloWorld — Thu, 15 Nov 2018 12:37:12 +0000

> I did vote for a third party rather than vote for Trump.
That makes you a Trump enabler, because it was clear that the third-party candidates weren't going to win.

> But I and many others feel that jabbing a person through the skull, sucking his or her brains out, crushing the skull, and tossing the body in a dumpster
The typical abortion boils down to taking a pill, taking another pill a few days later and then menstruating. It says something about you that you choose to argue in such a dishonest way.

> It's not supposed to be a forum for off-topic bashing of others' political views, nationalities, &c. Quit it.
Some political views deserve to be bashed, like most republican views these days. And most US citizens understand this, as can clearly be seen from the results of the popular votes over the last 20 years.

A "joke" in the glibc manual

Zolko — Thu, 15 Nov 2018 11:55:05 +0000

> Yet I bet most people would place abortion on the same side of this line

and how would the removal of a hidden joke about abortion change this if the name of the function remains abort() ? This thing is *NOT* about hurting people but about political correctness, in other words censorship, self-censorship in this case, which is clearly a core motive behind GNU and LibC. Stallman is right in defending this issue.

A "joke" in the glibc manual

Zolko — Thu, 15 Nov 2018 11:48:47 +0000

> the joke, as it clearly hurt some people, and it adds nothing useful to the abort() manual page

it clearly doesn't add anything useful to the abort() manual, but in what way does it hurt people ? It's not clear at all for me. If people are hurt by the *concept* of abortion, in either way — pro or contra — then it's the very *name* of the function that is hurting them, not some obscure joke. Do you support a proposal to rename the function ? (like terminate() or end() or whatever() )

A "joke" in the glibc manual

Zolko — Thu, 15 Nov 2018 11:39:56 +0000

tying the topic of abortion to a C function might be upsetting to some

it's not *a* C function but *the* C function called abort() !!!

A "joke" in the glibc manual

IanKelling — Wed, 14 Nov 2018 23:57:19 +0000

Sure. I didn't word that well, I didn't mean to imply there was a consensus.

A "joke" in the glibc manual

civodul — Tue, 13 Nov 2018 22:49:10 +0000

> There's been quite a lot of discussion on GNU internal mailing lists and just based on a cursory glance, it seems that significant parts of the GNU kind guidelines came directly from what maintainers suggested. Are you on those lists?

There _has_ been a lot of discussion on that list, no doubt about it. Perhaps Richard was somewhat influenced by these discussions and some maintainers do like these guidelines, but saying that the text "came directly from what maintainers suggested" is a bit of a stretch given the disagreements we've seen. It's unfortunate that that mailing list is private.

A "joke" in the glibc manual

LtWorf — Tue, 13 Nov 2018 13:14:12 +0000

Do you have to apologise to everyone that disagrees with you? See, that's the problem we were talking about.

A "joke" in the glibc manual

IanKelling — Tue, 13 Nov 2018 00:09:46 +0000

> without discussion

There's been quite a lot of discussion on GNU internal mailing lists and just based on a cursory glance, it seems that significant parts of the GNU kind guidelines came directly from what maintainers suggested. Are you on those lists?

A "joke" in the glibc manual

lsl — Mon, 12 Nov 2018 22:31:09 +0000

And yet, even the output of those "professional" media establishements can result in a reception that is accompanied by attacks on embassy buildings, flag burning ceremonies and even the death of people.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jyllands-Posten_Muhammad_ca...

A "joke" in the glibc manual

lsl — Mon, 12 Nov 2018 22:19:29 +0000

If clock_gettime and friends using the VDSO instead of doing the customary syscall dance is what you mean, then yes, musl does that (and has done so for some time).

It's mostly a kernel arch support thing, though. The libc side code is straightforward:

http://git.musl-libc.org/cgit/musl/tree/src/time/clock_ge...
http://git.musl-libc.org/cgit/musl/tree/src/internal/vdso.c

REPUBLICANLY_CORRECT

XTerminator — Mon, 12 Nov 2018 18:35:04 +0000

I'm glad we are still allowed to say things without being arrested or it being censored. (that's not a jab at lwn, but a general remark on the insanity that is contemporary pc )

REPUBLICANLY_CORRECT

johannbg — Mon, 12 Nov 2018 18:04:13 +0000

Given that I have a permanent place in hell and prairs for my soul according to Jehova witness who made the unfortunate mistake knocking on a vikings front door thus I have already been deemed to hell for those people that might take offense by this joke so I must be able to repeat it for eternity ;)

Q: Do you know the difference between Jesus and a picture of Jesus?

A: It only takes one nail to hang up the picture... ;)

Drum solo plz

A "joke" in the glibc manual

johannbg — Mon, 12 Nov 2018 17:38:32 +0000

Not sure how high or low the termination of pregnacy is here in Iceland and I dont think any one cares except for perhaps few extremists but there is new legislation in discussion in which the time that a woman can decide to terminate her pregnacy is being inreased from 12 weeks in pregnacy up to the 22 week of pregnacy as well as the transalation of the word/termology "abortion" will be abolished due to it being considered too judgmental/influencial for women in their decition making regarding their own pregnacy.

Long story put short all done to further emphazise and support the fact that this is entirely a womans choice at her own free will if she wants to proceed with or terminate her pregnacy.

Her body,her life,her choice it's as simple as that after all we live in the 21 century not the middle ages anymore. . .

A "joke" in the glibc manual

Cyberax — Mon, 12 Nov 2018 12:30:44 +0000

I don’t see him being a pariah for life. There’s also a way to, you know, apologize for bad tweets rather than just confirming that you’re a bigot.

A "joke" in the glibc manual

LtWorf — Mon, 12 Nov 2018 11:37:36 +0000

Remember this? https://github.com/opal/opal/issues/941

A "joke" in the glibc manual

jond — Mon, 12 Nov 2018 10:16:57 +0000

Great idea. Stallman could even quote from it at dinner parties.

A "joke" in the glibc manual

jond — Mon, 12 Nov 2018 10:14:06 +0000

> It is entirely subjective so that is obviously not true.

Weirdly, professional comics somehow determine what of their material to cultivate, and what to cull. So there is some basis upon which jokes can be evaluated.

A "joke" in the glibc manual

jond — Mon, 12 Nov 2018 10:13:07 +0000

> the joke is about _people that make the rules about abortion_ not anybody else

and if it was a better joke that would be clear, and there wouldn't be the collatoral damage that there is.

A "joke" in the glibc manual

mtaht — Mon, 12 Nov 2018 05:43:14 +0000

does musl do a glibc-like optimization for getting kernel time yet?

REPUBLICANLY_CORRECT

mtaht — Mon, 12 Nov 2018 05:41:31 +0000

Yes, that was funny.

I am perpetually pointing people at george carlin's riffs on language when these threads go on.

I *NEED* a good joke after writing OR reading documentation. *anything* to break the monotony. I reach for george carlin, or henry rollins, or bill hicks.

I'm kind of sad I can't tell blond or pollack jokes anymore without people taking offense. about the only stereotypical jokes I feel I can make anymore are drummer jokes...

... because they're all true. :)

What do you call a drummer without a girlfriend?

Homeless.