Re: [PATCH] manual: Remove warning in the documentation of the abort function

[Carlos O'Donell <carlos at redhat dot com>]

On 10/10/19 4:48 AM, Richard Stallman wrote:
> [[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider    ]]]
> [[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies,     ]]]
> [[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]]
> 
>   > The two issues are unrelated.  You are only making things worse for
>   > yourself and the community
> 
> That is a matter of judgment, and my judgment is different.
> 
> In my judgment, it is vital to decide, first, several broader issues
> that are bigger and more important.  Each of those issues affects the
> right way to decide this question _and other questions_.
> 
> I have not been idle about this.  I've brought up several of those
> issues, one by one, on this list, and we reached conclusions that are
> now stated in the coding standards or maintainer's guide.  But not
> quite all of them.  We should wait till the situation is clear and
> calm, then take up the remaining issues, one by one, with a month's
> pause in between.  Once they are resolved, we can wait another month,
> then take up the question of the abort(2) joke and decide it the right
> way.
> 
> That joke has been in the C Library manual for around 28 years, since
> I thoroughly rewrote that manual, and the sky has not fallen.  Let's
> not delay needlessly, but we should not be in a rush about the bigger
> issues.

The decision to remove the joke has been delayed for almost 1.5 years [1].
That we have no concrete conclusion today is again another indication to
me that the current governance structure of the GNU Project is not working.

As a GNU Maintainers for glibc I will no longer hold for further input
on the matter. I agree with Joseph, that your input shall be considered
as another previous maintainer's view on the topic.

We should have a discussion about when it is appropriate for GNU to 
intervene in decisions made by individual package maintainers. I look
forward to having that discussion (hopefully on a public mailing list).
I would hope such a discussion focuses on the GNU Maintainers Guide,
GNU's principles, and the GNU Coding Standard.

-- 
Cheers,
Carlos.

[1] https://sourceware.org/ml/libc-alpha/2018-05/msg00001.html