about RHL8 including glibc-2.2.93

[Andrew Walrond]

I have closely monitored the development of glibc for quite a while, and 
am entirely happy with the way Ulrich and Red Hat handle the development 
within the GNU/Linux community.

I use RH on my servers, and Gentoo on my desktops. Both see the benefits :)

Andrew Walrond

Ulrich Drepper wrote:

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>[ If you must, assume this mail was sent out not by a Red Hat employee
>but instead the official maintainer. ]
>
>
>It has been brought to my attention that once again a bunch of clueless
>people think they have the right and good reason to bash Red Hat for
>using glibc 2.2.93 + patches in the Red Hat Linux 8 release.
>
>Red Hat included this version of the library on my advise.  My advise as
>a Red Hat employee and with my blessing as the official maintainer of
>the package.  This separation of positions actually exists: I am not the
>maintainer of glibc for Red Hat.  The work I do is paid by Red Hat but
>not controlled by them (asm our sales people and various managers who
>would love for this not to be true).
>
>It was possible to make the decision to use the 2.2.93 code because at
>the time the distribution was finalized glibc 2.3 for x86 was already
>finished.  In fact, the engineering work for almost all parts of the
>library were finished.
>
>The fact that this happened in time is no coincident.  Red Hat has
>invested over the last 3-4 months considerable resources to the glibc
>development.  We had 3 people working fulltime on glibc and the related
>projects for this timeframe.  As everybody can ensure her/himself by
>looking at the ChangeLog the vast majority of work in this critical
>phase of the development of 2.3 was done by these 3 people.
>
>And what is more: in the process of preparing the RHL8 release all the
>resources available for testing the distribution (our QA people and beta
>testers) also helped to debug the new glibc release.  This is at least
>as critical as the development itself.  The participation in the
>pre-release testing for glibc has always been extremely weak.  We get
>usually replies and reports from half a dozen people.  Almost nobody is
>installing the newly compiled glibc on a system s/he is using all day,
>every day.  But this would be the only way to find the real problems.
>If you would look back at the release of glibc 2.2 you'd see that right
>after the release a lot more bugs were reported than during the entire
>test cycle.  People are simply not willing to install a test release on
>the system they depend on.  And for most people this is correct, the
>glibc documentation even warns about this.
>
>But this should make it obvious how completely invalid the complaints
>and accusations are.  Without the testing already performed by Red Hat
>and the users we would be many months behind the current state in terms
>of stability and without Red Hat's willingness to invest in the
>development we would probably not have seen glibc 2.3 being released for
> another 6 to 9 months.
>
>
>So:
>
>- - every organization has the possibility to speed up the development of
>any project by assigning enough developers to the project.
>Unfortunately this does not generally happen, at least not for glibc.
>In fact, looking at the ChangeLog it is easy to see that most
>distributions (with the notable exception of SuSE, Debian, and obviously
>Red Hat) do *nothing* at all to improve glibc (at least official version
>used by everybody);
>
>- - the use of the 2.2.93 sources + some patches in RHL8 was done as
>advised by the maintainer; this was one of the requirements formulated
>after similar complaints were made in the past.  The fact that I am also
>a Red Hat employee is irrelevant.  I do not think that anybody has any
>evidence for a claim that I make decisions which favor solely or even
>mostly Red Hat;
>
>- - the use of 2.2.93 was completely save.  The engineering work was
>already finished.  Any incompatibility would in any case have to be
>dealt with since glibc still intends to be binary compatible with glibc 2.0;
>
>- - without the efforts of Red Hat glibc wouldn't be where it is today.
>And all these improvements benefit every user of Linux despite the fact
>that the costs are mostly carried by Red Hat;
>
>- - the RHL8 release does not use glibc 2.3 to differentiate RHL from
>other distributions and make interoperability difficult or impossible.
>glibc 2.3 was used since all development in the last year or so went
>into the glibc 2.3 source base; the glibc 2.2 branch only received
>critical bug fixes.  glibc 2.3 is better overall, fewer bugs, faster,
>and more standard compliance (POSIX as well as LSB).  Especially this
>last point (LSB compliance) completely destroys the line of
>argumentation used.
>
>
>If somebody still choses to be paranoid and see something bad and
>sinister in everything Red Hat does, answer the simple question: what
>else should be done?  I can say that development of glibc happens as
>transparent as possible since I managed to enforce that we do not keep a
>separate internal CVS archive.
>
>If somebody choses not to believe a word I say because I'm part of the
>conspiracy this is her/his right.  But it is also my right to ignore
>such a person and I hope that with these explanations I can get a few
>more people to realize that ignoring these ultra-paranoid or plainly
>stupid people is the right thing to do.
>
>- -- 
>- --------------.                        ,-.            444 Castro Street
>Ulrich Drepper \    ,-----------------'   \ Mountain View, CA 94041 USA
>Red Hat         `--' drepper at redhat.com `---------------------------
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