Re: [PATCH] Revert Abortion joke removal.

[Zack Weinberg <zackw at panix dot com>]

On Tue, May 8, 2018 at 1:54 PM, Siddhesh Poyarekar <siddhesh@gotplt.org> wrote:
> On 05/08/2018 11:20 PM, Alexandre Oliva wrote:
>>
>> The insulting part is seeing (and posting as part of the patch) the "Do
>> not remove", not asking him or even letting him know, and putting the
>> change in despite the "Do not remove" objection, as if it wasn't even
>> there.  Not as if his opinion was like anyone else's, but as if it
>> didn't even count.
>
> No that's not an insult Alex.  You're once again attributing to malice what
> can be attributed to oversight.

I have mostly said everything that I have to say about this issue
already, but since I was the one who originally decided that we had
consensus in spite of the "Do not remove" in the manual, and that it
was not necessary to consult him before removing it, let me take this
opportunity to spell out exactly what I was thinking.

As I have said before, because RMS has not been actively involved in
the glibc project as a maintainer or contributor for many years, his
agreement to patches is not required in general.  Normally, we do not
even think of bringing him into our discussions; the last time I
recall its happening is when we were discussing changes to malloc that
affected Emacs, to which he *is* an active contributor; even then, we
consulted with the Emacs development community as a group, not him
specifically.  In this case, the only concrete reason why we might
have wanted to have his opinion was, we knew he originally wrote the
text that was proposed for removal, and we knew that *at the time* he
cared strongly enough about its inclusion to put a note in the source
code saying not to remove it.  But.  He did that in 1992.  (Thanks for
digging up the exact year, Joseph.)  1992 was twenty-six years ago.
RMS is known for his strongly and persistently held opinions, but even
so: do *you* still care about any particular two sentences of text you
wrote twenty-six years ago?

So my intention was to avoid wasting his time over something that I
doubted he cared about anymore.

zw