Glibc Steering Committee Dissolves; Switches To Co-Operative Development Model

First time accepted submitter writes "Following years under controversial leadership which, among other things, led to a fork (which was in turn adopted by some of the major distributions) the glibc development process has been reinvented to follow a slightly more informal, community-based model. Here's hoping glibc benefits from a welcome dose of pragmatism."

Summary

[TheRaven64]

The pissing match between RMS and Drepper that resulted in the steering committee is no longer longer relevant now Drepper has gone to work at Goldman Sachs (something that makes me smile: I can't think of any other company more deserving of him).

Re:fork valley

[TheRaven64]

Those are not forks, they are different implementations. The Android libc is based on FreeBSD libc with some tweaks. It does not share code with glibc.

Re:Drepper and Theo are great men. Respect them.

[Anonymous Coward]

Ulrich and Theo have both earned my respect based on their software development accomplishments. I could not care any less about what they may or may not have said to somebody on some mailing list or bug report. That is all secondary to the amazing software they're managed to produce.

I don't have exact numbers here, but Ulrich has had a massive role in producing what may very well be the most widely used C library ever. There's a very good chance that the very computer you're using right now is executing at least some of the code he's written hundreds of times each second! Then there are the millions of servers around the world running Linux and Glibc that are performing extremely important tasks, and they're likely doing this using at least some of Ulrich's code. That's a very significant accomplishment, and I have great respect for him because of this.

The same goes for Theo. He's managed to produce what may be the most secure pieces of software ever written. It's even more respectable because it's not just a single library or application. It's a whole UNIX-like system, for crying out loud! It's a great accomplishment to be so integral to an effort like OpenBSD, which has astoundingly great code quality and security.

I judge both Ulrich and Theo on their accomplishments, and they have nothing but the highest level of respect from me because of everything they've managed to build.

Re:Drepper and Theo are great men. Respect them.

[TheRaven64]

Theo and Drepper are very different. Theo is usually technically correct and has no time for people who can't work out why for themselves. Drepper is very often wrong, and is still an asshat in these cases.

Re:Drepper and Theo are great men. Respect them.

[rgbrenner]

When I first started using Linux (about '97).. I emailed Torvalds to say that I thought Linux needed to advertise because a lot of people didn't know it existed. He actually responded and politely explained how the project is put together/why that wasn't going to happen.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Excessive "modularity" can become hell.

[slashbart]

Amen!
I like Qt's approach with only a couple of large libraries (QtCore, QtGui, QtXml, ...) where each has a very clear usage, and if you don't want graphics you don't use QtGui, but if you do, everything is in QtGui. Here's the list [wikipedia.org]