At 19 Jun 2007 14:24:13 +0100, Ciaran O'Riordan wrote: > Having read about the libc5 fork of glibc in Rick Moen's "Fear of Forking" > essay, I went looking for more info about this fork since it seems to have > healed so well that no one ever talks about it anymore. It also seems > strangely underdocumented for a 10 year old event in a community that values > putting everything about everything online. > > http://fsfe.org/en/fellows/ciaran/ciaran_s_free_software_notes/history_of_glibc_and_linux_libc
The section heading "glib 2.0" should be "glibc 2.0". > If anyone knows any other sources of info that I didn't reference, I'd be > happy to hear about them. Ask the main players? Roland McGrath, [EMAIL PROTECTED], the original author of glibc and still one of the maintainers can probably tell you everything you want to know. And you can also ask Ulrich Drepper. There is also this glibc announcement from him, http://sources.redhat.com/ml/libc-announce/2001/msg00000.html (at the end of the announcement): "The glibc situation is even more frightening if one realizes the story behind it. When I started porting glibc 1.09 to Linux (which eventually became glibc 2.0) Stallman threatened me and tried to force me to contribute rather to the work on the Hurd. Work on Linux would be counter-productive to the Free Software course. Then came, what would be called embrace-and-extend if performed by the Evil of the North-West, and his claim for everything which lead to Linux's success." Although it's before my time, my guess is that the main reasons of the fork were GNU's cathedral-like development style at that time (see also the egcs fork) combined with the focus on the Hurd instead of Linux. Jeroen Dekkers _______________________________________________ Discussion mailing list Discussion@fsfeurope.org https://mail.fsfeurope.org/mailman/listinfo/discussion