[copyleft-next] HBR cure for 2013-02-03
"Claes Wallin (韋嘉誠)"
copyleft-next at clacke.user.lysator.liu.se
Sun Feb 10 04:53:24 UTC 2013
On 2013-02-10 11:43, Theodore Ts'o wrote:
> On Sun, Feb 10, 2013 at 10:20:04AM +0800, "Claes Wallin (韋嘉誠)" wrote:
>>> Consider if you will the case of Cygnus Support distributing gcc
>>> binaries for Solaris. Sun stopped shipping a compiler with their OS,
>>> so you couldn't build gcc from source unless you paid them $$$ for
>>> suncc, or if you obtained a bootstrap gcc binary from somewhere. But
>>> if the gcc binary was linked against the Solaris C library, which was
>>> most definitively _not_ licensed under a GPLv2 compatible license, the
>>> GPL would need to have some provision where it would be legal to
>>> distribute said gcc binary to the Solaris user.
>>
>> Fair point, but in this particular case, GCC could have been
>> bootstrapped to the point of being self-hosted with glibc, and at
>> that point there would be no confusion. Right?
>
> That's assuming that glibc actually worked on Solaris....
>
> From what I can tell, glibc suffers from the same bug that systemd,
> GNOME, etc. all suufer from. They use vast amounts of autoconf and
> libtool to obfuscate and slow down the build process, but then are so
> stuffed full of Linux dependencies that it's hard or impossible to
> make them work on anything other than Linux.
I only know that before glibc 2.0 it didn't work unpatched on a Linux
kernel. Today it may well be entrenched in Linux specifics, but that's
not where it came from. I assumed System V would have been the original
platform.
> Clearly we need an update from Henry Spencer's Ten Commandments for C
> programmers:
>
> 10. Thou shalt foreswear, renounce, and abjure the vile
> heresy which claimeth that ``All the world's a VAX'', and have
> no commerce with the benighted heathens who cling to this
> barbarous belief, that the days of thy program may be long
> even though the days of thy current machine be short.
> But anyway, this points out pretty clearly why the system library
> exemption was needed.
It does, I'm just off on a tangent here.
--
/c
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