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Comment by throwaways885 | Hacker News Reader

I think a big issue is there's no discipline in the Linux community. The Kernel team has done an amazing job of preserving ABI compatibility through every last byte, but then you look at projects like glib or GNOME which seem to pride themselves on huge, sweeping, changes and don't care if downstream consumers are hurt by the changes.

Edit: glib not glibc

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The Linux kernel team does not preserve ABI in almost all scenarios, just only specifically with the syscall interface. Everything else is not stable.

The GNU C standard library has binary backwards compatibility going back 20 years. They take great pains to preserve that. Are you thinking of glib instead of glibc? The former is from GNOME, and the latter is not.

"Syscall interface" is what most people mean by "$SYSTEM's ABI"

These days half of Linux is exported via filesystems, IOCTLs and other random pseudo-syscalls. Ignoring drivers, of course. The kernel isn't really that stable.

> Edit: glib not glibc

glib 2.0 was released in March of 2002, and has preserved ABI compatibility since then.

https://developer.gnome.org/glib/stable/glib-changes.html

Yes, he means gtk+, not glib. Glib is more fundamental and good from what I can tell.

> there's no discipline in the Linux community [...] look at projects like glibc or GNOME

So not the Linux community then. Outside it.

Do all the new GitHub-driven programmers who exclusively use MacBooks and constantly rev things with the same frequency not exist? Why is this still being presented as a freedesktop-related problem and not a general problem with creators' fickle and fleeting attention, when we have evidence that the category isn't as narrow as the pigeonhole you're trying to put things in?

> So not the Linux community then. Outside it.

Sadly, that ship has passed... long ago. When you encounter a random person about "Linux", they will think of the Linux ecosystem, not just the kernel. In other words, your and GP's definition of "Linux" is different, and they are both correct depending on how would you read it.

(And before you go almighty on definitions, the majority of linguists agree to just monitor - or "describe" - the words as normally and plainly used.)

I'm aware of the equivocation, but there's absurdity in the statement "there's no discipline in the Linux community" demanding a definition that excludes Linux proper. Descriptivists and prescriptivists should agree that no matter where you lie on the spectrum, this is bonkers.

No I do agree it's a general problem with software, but we're not talking about some rando throwing leftpad code up on GH. We're talking about a set of operating systems that clearly want more mainstream adoption being bewildered when they suck at respecting the user.

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