1.13.0 coreutils/id.c calls libc getgrouplist()

Rob Landley rob at landley.net
Mon Nov 17 00:15:21 UTC 2008


On Sunday 16 November 2008 16:41:44 Denys Vlasenko wrote:
> On Sunday 16 November 2008 07:02, Rob Landley wrote:
> > On Saturday 15 November 2008 21:21:10 Denys Vlasenko wrote:
> > > No, it is not resolved. Be realistic. You just got a complaint
> > > from a user. Do you think he wrote this email just to annoy you?
> >
> > Alan Cox once told me "a maintainer's job is to say no".
>
> And Linus said "I'm an asshole" or something close.

And proud of it, from what I recall.

> Unfortunately, too many maintainers took these examples
> way too literal. :)
> They bitch, sandblast, and berate their users
> because it feels good, not because users are wrong
> (even though they often are).

Sure.  Users are the reason to do open source projects in the first place.  
I'm just saying there's a balance, which is where judgement calls come in.

> > Yes, you have to _listen_ to every complaint, but it's a judgement call
> > which ones to _act_ on.  If you try to make everybody happy, you wind up
> > with gnu bloatware and _still_ up to your armpits in complaints.
> >
> > > Very unlikely. People typically wrote such emails when they
> > > got bitten by a problem, and in this case it is a legitimate
> > > problem (busybox can't be built with older uclibc),
> > > not a user error or something.
> >
> > No, busybox _can_, one specific applet can't.

Point ignored...

> > Most things can't be built with versions of uClibc before 0.9.26.  Older
> > versions of uClibc were _buggy_.
>
> But making busybox build at least with next-to-latest release
> is a right thing to do. It's unrealistic to expect everybody
> to jump on 0.9.30 overnight.

It's unrealistic to expect everybody to jump to busybox 1.13.0 overnight too.

Part of this depends on whether you believe busybox has a special relationship 
with uClibc or not.  Up until this past release, uClibc was a half-dead 
project.  It didn't even have a bugfix-only dot release in the whole of 2006.  
The gap between 0.9.28 and 0.9.29 was 21 months, and 0.9.29 to 0.9.30 was 17 
months.  I'm really really really hoping that changes now under Bernhard.

> > Supporting older versions of uClibc in newer
> > versions of busybox is a path to madness, and I speak from experience
> > here. (I can start listing things that were broken in 0.9.27 if you
> > like.)
>
> Supporting two dozens last releases is madness. Supporting one or two
> previous releases in addition to latest is not so hard,
> and it's more friendly to users.

*shrug*  You're the maintainer.

Rob



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