Re: GNU within the name

[Mathieu Roy]

Gunnar Wolf <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> said:

> Julian Mehnle dijo [Thu, Dec 18, 2003 at 12:56:15PM +0100]:
>> [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
>> > If we ever get a replacement libc that would really work as
>> > replacement... on such system GNU claims would become much weaker.  Not
>> > that there was a serious chance of that happening - drop-in replacement
>> > of glibc on Linux would be a lot of work and so far none of the
>> > alternative libc projects had tried to pull that off.
>> 
>> Why would anyone want to replace GLIBC in the first place?  To get rid of 
>> "GNU" in "GNU/Linux"?
>
> Maintainability? Many people (not me, I would lack that level of
> technical skills) have pointed out that glibc's code is a mess.
>
> Ability to distribute under another license? Yes, it might not be a
> priority in Debian (we are, after all, pro-GPL), but many people would
> like having a BSD-style libc for Linux...

The glibc is LGPLed, not GPLed. If even LGPL is not enough for
someone, I'm not sure he's looking to contribute to Free Software
development. 





-- 
Mathieu Roy

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Re: GNU within the name

[Mathieu Roy]

Erik Steffl <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> said:

> Mathieu Roy wrote:
> ...
>> When I'm told that a system is running GNU/whatever, I expect first to
>> find there GNU coreutils, GNU bash, GNU Emacs, GNU Compiler
>> Collection, gzip, GNU awk,GNU make, the GNU Debugger, GNU sysutils,
>> GNU tar, GNUpg, GNU grep, GNU mailutils, GNU ncurses, GNU readline,
>> GNU shellutils, GNU wget...
>
>you can install these on pretty much any system... is my gaming
> machine running gnu/win xp? or did we use gnu/solaris at -xxx-?

Maybe, yes.

>this GNU narcissism is pretty annoying... where's the freedom RSM
> is promoting? the software is released under GPL and that's
> it.

You can call that narcissism. In these days, I do not think that the
freedom Richard Stallman, via the GNU project, promoted are so famous
that we can afford to forgot an occasion to advertise.


> Nowhere in the GPL it says you have to call your project
> GNU/something.

Is there anybody that ever made that request? You now, it is not about
giving to the Linux project, a kernel project, the GNU prefix. It is
about naming the system itself, system composed partly, but only
partly, of the Linux kernel.



-- 
Mathieu Roy

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Re: GNU within the name

[Erik Steffl]

Mathieu Roy wrote:
...
When I'm told that a system is running GNU/whatever, I expect first to
find there GNU coreutils, GNU bash, GNU Emacs, GNU Compiler
Collection, gzip, GNU awk,GNU make, the GNU Debugger, GNU sysutils,
GNU tar, GNUpg, GNU grep, GNU mailutils, GNU ncurses, GNU readline,
GNU shellutils, GNU wget...
  you can install these on pretty much any system... is my gaming 
machine running gnu/win xp? or did we use gnu/solaris at -xxx-?

  this GNU narcissism is pretty annoying... where's the freedom RSM is 
promoting? the software is released under GPL and that's it. Nowhere in 
the GPL it says you have to call your project GNU/something.

erik

Re: GNU within the name (Was: Changes in formal naming for NetBSD porting effort(s))

[Joel Baker]

On Thu, Dec 18, 2003 at 12:06:56PM +, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> On Thu, Dec 18, 2003 at 12:56:15PM +0100, Julian Mehnle wrote:
> > [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> > > If we ever get a replacement libc that would really work as
> > > replacement... on such system GNU claims would become much weaker.
> > > Not that there was a serious chance of that happening - drop-in
> > > replacement of glibc on Linux would be a lot of work and so far none
> > > of the alternative libc projects had tried to pull that off.
> >
> > Why would anyone want to replace GLIBC in the first place? To get rid
> > of "GNU" in "GNU/Linux"?
>
> glibc has its problems and alternative libc implementations do exist
> (mostly for embedded use), but AFAIK none of them tries to become a
> full-blown thing.
>
> As for the reasons why somebody would do such replacement... Beats me
> - ask the guy who'd brought that up. IMO it's very unlikely, to put it
> mildly.

The impression (and, frankly, not an entirely clear one) I have gotton
from RMS's various comments on the naming, especially in regards to
NetBSD, boil down to the following (modulo probably screwing up the
capitalization, which I can never remember the rules for, and I do
apologize ahead of time):

"GNU represents the Gnu system, running with a native (Hurd) kernel"

"GNU/Linux is the Gnu system, using Linux as a kernel"

What isn't entirely clear to me, here, is just how much composes "the Gnu
system". It seems fairly clear to me that Robert Millan's work (which is
Debian's normal core userland, GNU-based, plus GNU libc) is more or less
identical to Debian's normal situation, but with a NetBSD kernel instead
of Linux. Therefore, I'm fairly certain it could be called "GNU/NetBSD"
(or, to make the NetBSD folks happier, "GNU/KNetBSD") and be precisely as
accurate as "GNU/Linux".

My porting work, however, uses the native NetBSD libc (and libm, and more
or less everything coming from that particular part of the source tree). It
still uses a primarily GNU-based userland (GNU coreutils instead of NetBSD
cat, ls, etc; GNU compiler; GNU tar instead of NetBSD tar or pax; etc). To
date, we had used "GNU/NetBSD" simply because it wasn't considered to be
worth having the argument over, and we were still using quite a lot of GNU
stuff, so figured it wasn't unreasonable to give them due credit (and that
if RMS objected, saying it wasn't "the Gnu system", well, we'd be quite
happy to drop the "GNU/" bit, of course...)

None of this really applies to changing the Linux ports away from glibc,
of course. But such a topic doesn't really belong on debian-bsd, anyway.
-- 
Joel Baker <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>,''`.
Debian GNU/NetBSD(i386) porter   : :' :
 `. `'
   `-


pgp2thz5cJyxF.pgp
Description: PGP signature

Re: GNU within the name (Was: Changes in formal naming for NetBSD porting effort(s))

[Raul Miller]

On Thu, Dec 18, 2003 at 10:41:46AM +0100, Mathieu Roy wrote:
> You are currently saying that the GNU in GNU/Linux is justified by the
> glibc and not by any other GNU software, because these GNU software
> are common on other unixes.

Maybe what he was saying, but that's obviously not the real issue.

The original reason for the change from "Linux" to "GNU/Linux"
was that:

the kernel was developed and built with gcc AND
libc was gnu AND
most of the system tools in userland were gnu AND
the developers involved were not rabidly anti-gnu

(though the switch did flush a bit of rabid anti-gnu sentiment out of
the community).

The bsd port is still mostly vapor, so it's kinda hard to figure out how
much of the above is relevant.  Thus, knowing whether "GNU" is appropriate
(or whether a de-emphasized lower case "gnu" is appropriate) is more a
matter of speculation than a matter of hard fact.

Moreover, this speculation touches on a lot of issues (aesthetics, us
vs. them group dynamics, incompatibilities, bugs, and the hard technical
work of a very few) which mean we'll probably be seeing echos of this
supposed trademark discussion for years.

I've even contributed to it a bit myself -- it's an easy discussion to
jump into, even though it's not really a well defined problem.

> If we follow your theory, it means that if someday another system use
> the glibc, we should remove the GNU from the GNU/Linux name. 

We don't, as a general rule, follow theories very far.  Theories are a
good starting point, but they have to stand up to testing.

That said, I could wish for the gnu glibc crew to have a more up-to-date
website [forinstance].

-- 
Raul

Re: GNU within the name (Was: Changes in formal naming for NetBSD porting effort(s))

[viro]

On Thu, Dec 18, 2003 at 02:26:27PM +0200, Momchil Velikov wrote:
> > "Mathieu" == Mathieu Roy <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> 
> Mathieu> If we follow your theory, it means that if someday another
> Mathieu> system use the glibc, we should remove the GNU from the
> Mathieu> GNU/Linux name.



Arrgh...

My apologies - I've managed to misparse the quote above.  Sorry.

OK...  That way it does make sense, but...  the rest of the arguments still
stands - libc has at least the same influence as the kernel and far more
than which implementation of cp(1), etc. is used on the system.

Anyway, that's far off-topic, so let's keep the followups off-list.
Apologies for misparsing.

Re: GNU within the name (Was: Changes in formal naming for NetBSD porting effort(s))

[Gunnar Wolf]

Julian Mehnle dijo [Thu, Dec 18, 2003 at 12:56:15PM +0100]:
> [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> > If we ever get a replacement libc that would really work as
> > replacement... on such system GNU claims would become much weaker.  Not
> > that there was a serious chance of that happening - drop-in replacement
> > of glibc on Linux would be a lot of work and so far none of the
> > alternative libc projects had tried to pull that off.
> 
> Why would anyone want to replace GLIBC in the first place?  To get rid of 
> "GNU" in "GNU/Linux"?

Maintainability? Many people (not me, I would lack that level of
technical skills) have pointed out that glibc's code is a mess.

Ability to distribute under another license? Yes, it might not be a
priority in Debian (we are, after all, pro-GPL), but many people would
like having a BSD-style libc for Linux...

...Or the good ol' 'Because it's there' stuff? :)

Greetings,

-- 
Gunnar Wolf - [EMAIL PROTECTED] - (+52-55)5630-9700 ext. 1366
PGP key 1024D/8BB527AF 2001-10-23
Fingerprint: 0C79 D2D1 2C4E 9CE4 5973  F800 D80E F35A 8BB5 27AF

Re: GNU within the name (Was: Changes in formal naming for NetBSD porting effort(s))

[Momchil Velikov]

> "Mathieu" == Mathieu Roy <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:

Mathieu> If we follow your theory, it means that if someday another
Mathieu> system use the glibc, we should remove the GNU from the
Mathieu> GNU/Linux name.

FWIW, BeOS uses glibc.  

~velco

Re: GNU within the name (Was: Changes in formal naming for NetBSD porting effort(s))

[viro]

On Thu, Dec 18, 2003 at 12:56:15PM +0100, Julian Mehnle wrote:
> [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> > If we ever get a replacement libc that would really work as
> > replacement... on such system GNU claims would become much weaker.  Not
> > that there was a serious chance of that happening - drop-in replacement
> > of glibc on Linux would be a lot of work and so far none of the
> > alternative libc projects had tried to pull that off.
> 
> Why would anyone want to replace GLIBC in the first place?  To get rid of 
> "GNU" in "GNU/Linux"?

glibc has its problems and alternative libc implementations do exist (mostly
for embedded use), but AFAIK none of them tries to become a full-blown thing.

As for the reasons why somebody would do such replacement...  Beats me - ask
the guy who'd brought that up.  IMO it's very unlikely, to put it mildly.

Re: GNU within the name

[viro]

On Thu, Dec 18, 2003 at 12:15:37PM +0100, Mathieu Roy wrote:
> > Why not?
> 
> You said what I expected from you: you revealed that you disbelieve
> that the system should be called GNU/Linux. Good to know in this kind
> of discussion.



I'm not a True Believer, if that's what you mean.

> Why not? 
> 
> I will not reply to that question, I think there is enough information
> on the web about that, for instance
>  
 
You do realize that you are emulating a garden-variety bible-thumper here?

> When I'm told that a system is running GNU/whatever, I expect first to
> find there GNU coreutils, GNU bash, GNU Emacs, GNU Compiler
> Collection, gzip, GNU awk,GNU make, the GNU Debugger, GNU sysutils,
> GNU tar, GNUpg, GNU grep, GNU mailutils, GNU ncurses, GNU readline,
> GNU shellutils, GNU wget... 
> 
> These are required components of a system. The daemons you install on

Oh, really?

emacs:  priority: optional
gawk:   priority: optional (BTW, mawk is required)
make:   priority: standard
gcc et.al.  ditto (at most)
gdb:ditto
sysutils:   optional
gnupg:  standard
mailutils:  optional
readline:   standard
shellutils: eaten by coreutils, what the hell are you talking about?
wget:   optional

> that system are not basis components, as you may well not be using
> them at all.

Like, say it, init?  Or cron/anacron/combination thereof?  Or syslogd, or...?

> Anyway, your proposal is unrelated to the current subject: the NetBSD
> port of Debian GNU. Unless you are about to propose that Debian
> completely change it's naming policy, I think we can stop this
> dicussion now.

As I've said, until the hell freezes and we get a drop-in replacement of
glibc, it's moot - Linux-based ports will be glibc-based anyway.  I'm not
particulary interested in discussing the appropriate names for inexistent
objects, so I'm only glad to drop that.

RE: GNU within the name (Was: Changes in formal naming for NetBSD porting effort(s))

[Julian Mehnle]

[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> If we ever get a replacement libc that would really work as
> replacement... on such system GNU claims would become much weaker.  Not
> that there was a serious chance of that happening - drop-in replacement
> of glibc on Linux would be a lot of work and so far none of the
> alternative libc projects had tried to pull that off.

Why would anyone want to replace GLIBC in the first place?  To get rid of "GNU" 
in "GNU/Linux"?

Re: GNU within the name

[Mathieu Roy]

[EMAIL PROTECTED] said:

> On Thu, Dec 18, 2003 at 10:41:46AM +0100, Mathieu Roy wrote:
>> You are currently saying that the GNU in GNU/Linux is justified by the
>> glibc and not by any other GNU software, because these GNU software
>> are common on other unixes.
>> 
>> Why? If you are right that others unixes uses widely GNU software,
>> maybe they should consider recognize the GNU part of the their
>> system. But that's a different story.
>> 
>> If we follow your theory, it means that if someday another system use
>> the glibc, we should remove the GNU from the GNU/Linux name. 
>
> Why not?

You said what I expected from you: you revealed that you disbelieve
that the system should be called GNU/Linux. Good to know in this kind
of discussion.

Why not? 

I will not reply to that question, I think there is enough information
on the web about that, for instance
 


>> It does not make sense: the GNU part of the name shows that the system
>> used is the system designed/initiated by the GNU project running with
>> the kernel Linux, which is not part of GNU. It does not mean that
>> there are GNU software rarely used elsewhere in the system! 
>
> Debian had not been initiated by GNU project, IIRC.  "Designated" is
> closer to reality, but that wouldn't warrant _anything_ - after all,
> gcc had been designated as a primary C compiler on a lot of systems,
> but that doesn't make it {lots of organizations}/gcc.  It doesn't work
> in that direction - *contributor* may have a right to make demands, not
> the other way round.
>
> And yes, GNU *had* contributed stuff.  The main dependency being glibc.
>
> BTW, if you are talking about frequency of use, glibc beats everything
> else by far.  With X11 and assorted daemons (almost all of them coming
> not from GNU) contending for the second place - depends on the type of use.
>
> If we ever get a replacement libc that would really work as replacement...
> on such system GNU claims would become much weaker.  Not that there was
> a serious chance of that happening - drop-in replacement of glibc on Linux
> would be a lot of work and so far none of the alternative libc projects had
> tried to pull that off.

When I'm told that a system is running GNU/whatever, I expect first to
find there GNU coreutils, GNU bash, GNU Emacs, GNU Compiler
Collection, gzip, GNU awk,GNU make, the GNU Debugger, GNU sysutils,
GNU tar, GNUpg, GNU grep, GNU mailutils, GNU ncurses, GNU readline,
GNU shellutils, GNU wget... 

These are required components of a system. The daemons you install on
that system are not basis components, as you may well not be using
them at all.

Anyway, your proposal is unrelated to the current subject: the NetBSD
port of Debian GNU. Unless you are about to propose that Debian
completely change it's naming policy, I think we can stop this
dicussion now.



-- 
Mathieu Roy

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Re: GNU within the name (Was: Changes in formal naming for NetBSD porting effort(s))

[viro]

On Thu, Dec 18, 2003 at 10:41:46AM +0100, Mathieu Roy wrote:
> You are currently saying that the GNU in GNU/Linux is justified by the
> glibc and not by any other GNU software, because these GNU software
> are common on other unixes.
> 
> Why? If you are right that others unixes uses widely GNU software,
> maybe they should consider recognize the GNU part of the their
> system. But that's a different story.
> 
> If we follow your theory, it means that if someday another system use
> the glibc, we should remove the GNU from the GNU/Linux name. 

Why not?

> It does not make sense: the GNU part of the name shows that the system
> used is the system designed/initiated by the GNU project running with
> the kernel Linux, which is not part of GNU. It does not mean that
> there are GNU software rarely used elsewhere in the system! 

Debian had not been initiated by GNU project, IIRC.  "Designated" is
closer to reality, but that wouldn't warrant _anything_ - after all,
gcc had been designated as a primary C compiler on a lot of systems,
but that doesn't make it {lots of organizations}/gcc.  It doesn't work
in that direction - *contributor* may have a right to make demands, not
the other way round.

And yes, GNU *had* contributed stuff.  The main dependency being glibc.

BTW, if you are talking about frequency of use, glibc beats everything
else by far.  With X11 and assorted daemons (almost all of them coming
not from GNU) contending for the second place - depends on the type of use.

If we ever get a replacement libc that would really work as replacement...
on such system GNU claims would become much weaker.  Not that there was
a serious chance of that happening - drop-in replacement of glibc on Linux
would be a lot of work and so far none of the alternative libc projects had
tried to pull that off.