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65 Comments
- Fizzbuzzmeh, on 05/09/2009, -0/+90Glibc is a really basic library of functionality on Linux. Just about every program uses it, because it does simple things like allocate memory, compare text, print to the screen, and such. One of the most important people in glibc is called Ulrich Drepper, who, while technically very advanced, can be somewhat abrasive towards other people, and often rejects changes he doesn't like even though they seem smart to everyone else.
Some people have had enough of Drepper not implementing things they want, and also his rudeness, and are taking a copy of glibc that they will modify themselves to do what they want. The hope is that this version will be updated more often, be more stable, have more features, and generally be a nicer project to work with. If they succeed, Debian - and presumably also other distros that depend on Debian, such as Ubuntu and Mepis, will benefit greatly.
Similar things have happened in the past, eg with GCC (egcs) and XFree86 (X.org), and both times were very beneficial. - KAMiKAZOW, on 05/09/2009, -0/+40The TuxRadar story is not really accurate. It focuses of Drepper's personality, but kicking an ***** in the butt is only a side effect. The most reasons are pure technical (pasted from the real story behind the "This blog post" link):
# Stable branch with fixes for important bugs (a real one, not like the GLIBC one which is left unchanged).
# Better support for embedded architectures.
# Support for different shells (GLIBC only supports bash).
# Support for building with -Os.
# Configurable components (do we really need NIS or RPC support in debian-installer?).
# Better testsuite for optimized or biarch packages. - AngelBunny, on 05/09/2009, -1/+31thank you Fizzbuzzmeh
- Frostek, on 05/09/2009, -0/+28No, because we can ***** read.
- ThantiK, on 05/09/2009, -0/+25The reason debian is switching to EGLIBC is because Ulrich refused to fix a GLARING bug because it was "Only benefits this embedded crap". He basically told debian - ***** you guys, I don't like embedded so I'm not going to fix this problem
That's why they are moving to EGLIBC - And I hope other distros do as well. With ubuntu having an ARM port - I suspect they'll move along to eglibc with debian as well. Beautiful thing about open source is that any problems that arise, WE CAN FIX THEM! - Innus, on 05/09/2009, -13/+36Yeah drepper is incredibly rude (e.g. in this bug report: http://sourceware.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=498 ... )
I've found a pic of him anyway, explains a lot: http://i17.photobucket.com/albums/b60/Ely94/FatCom ... - Aurabolt, on 05/09/2009, -0/+22If this change is done correctly, no one should even notice any changes from the user perspective, but it could be a huge deal from the sysadmin perspective.
- tnoy, on 05/09/2009, -0/+20"Paid $1 via paypal. Trans ID 3H4989806A1962407
Please fix."
Further down the list, haha. - gsnedders, on 05/09/2009, -0/+19It's meant to be binary and source compatible with glibc, so it should be no problem and should just flow downstream like anything else.
- sexybobo, on 05/09/2009, -2/+19the guy in charge of GLIBC is an ***** that won't allow fixes for stuff that is clearly broken so some one took the GLIBC code and created a new project called EGLIBC which works the same but is updated more since there is a competent person in charge.
- twiztidsinz, on 05/09/2009, -1/+17There's some funny stuff there:
------- Additional Comment #35 From Osama bin Drepper 2008-07-08 18:08 -------
Is this open source terrorism? "Pay us money or the bug stays!"
------- Additional Comment #36 From Ulrich Drepper 2008-07-08 18:28 -------
(In reply to comment #35)
> Is this open source terrorism? "Pay us money or the bug stays!"
Idiot. There is no bug. Don't reopen.
------- Additional Comment #37 From Ulrich Drepper 2008-07-08 18:50 -------
(In reply to comment #36)
> (In reply to comment #35)
> > Is this open source terrorism? "Pay us money or the bug stays!"
>
> Idiot. There is no bug. Don't reopen.
Will you reopen it for.. one MEEEEEEEEELLION dollars?
------- Additional Comment #38 From Ulrich Drepper 2008-07-08 18:54 -------
There is nothing to reopen. Period.
------- Additional Comment #39 From Regis Philbin 2008-07-08 19:11 -------
(In reply to comment #38)
> There is nothing to reopen. Period.
Would you say that's your FINAL ANSWER? - rockets, on 05/09/2009, -0/+15@fizzbuzzmeh: You, sir or madam, are the spirit of OSS embodied. Thanks for taking your time to explain, very well, what is this all about. Kudos!
- Paranoidmarvin, on 05/09/2009, -3/+18Interesting, I wonder how much effect this will have downstream on Ubuntu
- ukblacknight, on 05/09/2009, -4/+18Ulrich? Is that you?!
- SteveMax, on 05/09/2009, -0/+14Note that most of those "Ulrich Drepper"s are actually Reddit users who created accounts there to troll after reading about the bug. The real Drepper's email is @redhat.com; mouseover to see who is who.
- pingveno, on 05/09/2009, -1/+14Ubuntu is a Debian derivative with many of the same packages so I can't see then *not* switching.
- bratterscain, on 05/09/2009, -4/+17lol, strangely after reading that, I like this guy now.
"Strange, I never saw your name on my paycheck. Since if that's not the case you
cannot order me around." - brickbat, on 05/09/2009, -2/+14Just forget it. This won't affect users.
- tnoy, on 05/09/2009, -0/+11The most difficult thing you'll run into is your project lead admitting he was wrong.
- inactive, on 05/09/2009, -0/+10I dunno, the linuxhaters cover on the story is quite..... amusing:
As those of you who have nothing better to do than follow Linux news might have heard, Debian is switching to eglibc.
What’s eglibc you say? since nobody will say it in public, I will. It’s just glibc, sans jackass. The project says they’re trying to “maintain an open development environment encouraging broad, cooperative developer participation”, but those of you who have been around know exactly what this means.
F. U. D.
Yes, that’s right. ***** Ulrich Drepper. - AngelBunny, on 05/09/2009, -4/+14Can anyone explain the details to me about this please? My headless box uses debian currently and I love the OS but regardless I'm not some super high end linux geek so I do not know what this means to me.
- rockets, on 05/09/2009, -1/+11Can we switch from Ulirch instead? Seems like the best tradeoff. I will open a bug report to fix Ulrich... wonder who the ticket will be assigned to (Red Hat?)
- mattgilberg, on 05/10/2009, -0/+9Sigh....I miss Digg's infancy when a story like this would have been "Top 10" material.
- SteveMax, on 05/09/2009, -1/+10I hope this won't be as painful as the change from libc5 to glibc, so long ago. I still have nightmares about the months of breakage that followed that on my Red Hat (or was it Conectiva? I'm not 100% sure) box when that happened.
- rmxz, on 05/09/2009, -5/+14Probably very little.
Either Ubuntu sticks with glibc, in which it has no effect at all...
Or the Debian guys figure out all the gotchas and port any apps that need porting; and after that's done Ubuntu can pull them from Debian after the glitches have all been worked out. - KAMiKAZOW, on 05/09/2009, -0/+8Yes
- tnoy, on 05/09/2009, -0/+7Unless you're a user that has a problem due to the bugs that is broken because of glibc
- inactive, on 05/09/2009, -3/+10Yer its funny to see all these idiots demanding he explain it to them. Then some ignorant arse loser from reddit hops in with his 2c to say NER NER Your and idiot but I dont know anything about the topic but geeee u seem mean.
Also your typical debian maintainer is easily as bigger arse as Drepper is when yelling at idiots. - KAMiKAZOW, on 05/09/2009, -0/+6From what I've read, it's pretty common for distros to ship a patched glibc, because Drepper refuses to add many patches.
So maybe distros ship a patchset that also enables other shells.
Cdrecord was not forked into Cdrkit, because Debian dislikes Jörg Schilling (even though Schilling has a similar attitude to Drepper). The main reason for the fork was the license change to the GPL-incompatible CDDL (Schilling refused dual licensing). Schilling's POV is outlined here: http://cdrecord.berlios.de/private/linux-dist.html
An opposing view (not officially by Debian though and sadly only in German) is here: http://cdrtruth.wordpress.com/ - codingasanart, on 05/09/2009, -1/+7WildTang3nt: I've run into the same thing with many developers, not just OS developers, and I think a lot of it has to do with the lack of social skills or any form of organizational behavior. On the other hand, I've worked with many wonderful OS developers who have been very helpful and friendly... life of a developer...
- SteveMax, on 05/09/2009, -0/+6The eglibc FAQ at http://www.eglibc.org/faq isn't so certain about it. They say they "hope" to keep binary compatibility, but they don't put it as one of their goals. Actually, their mission at http://www.eglibc.org/mission includes "Retain API and ABI compatability with GLIBC *wherever feasible*".
Since the C library is quite possibly the most important library in a system, I'm not sure if having ABI compatibility "wherever feasible" is enough. Looks better than the libc5-glibc situation, but breakage seems to still be a possibility. - Darkhacker, on 05/10/2009, -0/+6It may be bland for a non-geek, but Glibc is considered to be damn near the defacto libc implementation for Linux. To see an influential distribution like Debian switching away from it is somewhat news worthy. In reality it probably won't affect users or application developers at all, but it does show the importance of open source and how competition thrives. Also, what was inaccurate about it?
- inactive, on 05/09/2009, -0/+5so its not Emacs-Glibc ? :P
- rangah, on 05/09/2009, -0/+5"Support for different shells" I wonder what that means. Maybe I don't understand what they mean by 'support'. I've been using zsh instead of bash for the last 4 years and have never had any problems.
It's also not unlike debian to do something solely because it collectively hates someone. cdrkit... - MicrosoftBob, on 05/10/2009, -0/+5No, that's what you call Open Source.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_source#The_Open_ ... - sanskrtam, on 05/09/2009, -1/+6What about other major Linux distros besides Debian and its derivatives? Will they still use Glibc?
- SteveMax, on 05/09/2009, -0/+4Actually, from the FAQ at http://www.eglibc.org/faq :
"The EGLIBC maintainers hope that EGLIBC will be binary compatible with GLIBC"
Key word is "hope". We can only hope their hopes are fulfilled... - Dunge, on 05/09/2009, -0/+4I'm working on an Debian Embedded device but my prog lead don't want us to try eglibc (or uclibc which seems better) cause he's afraid other problems will arise. Could it? What about X-Window support?
- radu79, on 05/10/2009, -0/+3I am a developer, and although I get along pretty fine with the other developers in my team (mostly because we work at different parts), I can understand this kind of temper.
What happens is, you do a lot of work for free, then all kind of people will tell you their opinion about your work, and many time they think they are entitled to dictate you how to do stuff. It's a very tankless job, and a lot of people with good social skills will eventually snap. - WildTang3nt, on 05/09/2009, -2/+5I find this type of personality to be quite common among linux/BSD developers and speaking as someone who's worked with developers of Ubuntu and other distros based on it in the past, I find it quite annoying. I don't know what it is about us geeks that predisposes us to such attitudes, but it's very counter-productive. Our egos sometimes just get too big for ourselves.
- SteveMax, on 05/09/2009, -0/+3From the links on TF(real)A, it looks like some glibc functions used by ldd expect /bin/sh to be a link to /bin/bash, and if you have some other shell (such as dash) that follows the Bourne shell standard a bit differently than bash does, things break. That was pointed out to the developer, who said basically "use bash then, we don't support anything else". This makes ldd (and possibly glibc itself) useless under busybox.
- theratboy, on 05/09/2009, -1/+3I second that
- pinguz, on 05/09/2009, -0/+2thanks, that was an interesting read :)
- KAMiKAZOW, on 05/10/2009, -0/+2Since Drepper is employed by Red Hat, Fedora and RHEL will stay with glibc.
I haven't seen anything from SUSE, Arch, and Mandriva about this issue. - factotum218, on 05/10/2009, -0/+2Looking forward to it. Progress is progress.
- radu79, on 05/10/2009, -0/+2Given the fact that there are MANY applications that are distributed in binary format, and that there is an infinity of software and hardware configurations, I am pretty sure there will be some problems. libc is the foundation of the whole Linux stuff, >99.9% of the Linux programs use at least a libc function.
- MicrosoftBob, on 05/10/2009, -0/+2One of the reasons I go to Ars to really get my geek on.
- sexybobo, on 05/10/2009, -0/+1I really over simplified every thing there was a lot more going on then just the one ***** but he is one of the bigger reasons.
- oomfoofoo, on 05/11/2009, -1/+2Coming soon to Digg--"How to install eglibc on ubuntu"
- chimchim64, on 05/10/2009, -0/+1From what I can tell, EGLIBC is basically a variant of GLIBC with some added or fixed elements for embedded systems. So I doubt there will be much impact. Since they are so similar if there is any difference there is probably compatibility layer that would be easy to inject.
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