GNU libc became community-driven

aleph · #1 5th May 2012, 09:35 AM

https://lwn.net/Articles/488847/

No, that's not exactly news (from March 28), but I still find it newsworthy.

It used to be the cathedral in the world of bazaars, guarded by a vigorous (or rabid, depending on your side) nucleus of devs, mostly consisting of the man Ulrich Drepper, who now works for Goldman Sachs (

).

Now with the steering committee self-disbanded, it would become more like the Linux kernel, and we may expect a growing flux of releases. Among the consequences, it's quite likely that the horribly inefficient BSD crap will finally conquer our bastion of sanity (or bigotry), which is a bad (or good) thing.

fedvasu · #2 5th May 2012, 06:00 PM

Anybody uses strcat or variants deserved to be punished , LOL!!

This dude is 10 times grumpier than Torvalds.

***Gareth Jones*** · #3 6th May 2012, 04:24 PM

As unpleasant as old Ulrich was to deal with, unfortunately he was usually right regarding the technical stuff. A lot of the stuff he rejected, from BSD or elsewhere, was because it genuinely was the wrong solution to the problem.

It'll be interesting to see how this turns out.

aleph · #4 7th May 2012, 07:47 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Gareth Jones

As unpleasant as old Ulrich was to deal with, unfortunately he was usually right regarding the technical stuff. A lot of the stuff he rejected, from BSD or elsewhere, was because it genuinely was the wrong solution to the problem.

It'll be interesting to see how this turns out.

That was my thought too. But in the end it may not matter. Those who knows the Right Way (TM) already knows the Right Way, and those who don't will eventually be punished by their own mistakes and get coerced to commit to the Right Way by the hard and cold reality, or otherwise perish. So look, this is a self-correcting problem

To be serious, more open-minded development means bugs get fixed and new feature gets implemented more efficiently, as is happening to the Linux kernel. But then again, glibc is already pretty stable and feature-complete. It's not like Linux which has to support new chips. So yes, the merit is debatable and only time can tell.