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Comment by ur-whale | Hacker News Reader

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ur-whale·

>> glibc was maintained by the biggest asshole in all of software engineering > You mean Roland? What did he do?

Ulrich Drepper

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Out of curiosity: What did Drepper do? A quick DDG/Google search didn't turn up anything.

EDIT: Actually, searching for "Ulrich Drepper asshole" did turn up some stuff. I'd still be interested, as the stuff I found was rather general.

This seems that it could be upsetting to some people https://udrepper.livejournal.com/7326.html

I'd never seen that one. Wow!!

Did you bother to read? It's about the combinatorial explosion that happens when you need to support lots of configurations. It's apolitical.

Yeah, that's one of the few things I've seen from Drepper that actually seemed reasonable and defensible.

Am I missing the part that makes it upsetting? I was expecting something full of cusses and ad-hominems.

You're going down an end-less rathole...

Ulrich made tons of bad technical decisions, and mistreated everyone who disagreed with him, was the reason Debian forked glibc for a long time, etc. There are some famous bugzillas that are utterly unexplainable.

Here's one notorious example of Drepper's behavior:

https://sourceware.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=4980

(2007) "gethostbyname() etc break for /etc/hosts with both ::1 and 127.0.0.1 localhost entries" Initially closed by Drepper as "WONTFIX" or "NOTABUG" (can't find state history and it's been a while!) with dismissive comments, continuing to do so after people patiently explained how this was a real issue. It was eventually resolved (I don't know by whom)

Here's a taste:

https://sourceware.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=4980

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