Wjaguar

On "holy wars"

Hi,

You recently reverted a change to the term "Linux" as used on the mtPaint article with the comment:

GNU/Linux the OS vs Linux the kernel is a technical distinction; please take your holywar elsewhere

On the contrary, we've discussed this exhaustively on Talk:Linux over the years, and the project as a whole has a consensus that the term "GNU/Linux" is not a "technical distinction" so much as it is a minority term. The rest of Wikipedia uses "Linux" consistently; the Linux article itself explains the origin of the "GNU/Linux" term and where it fits into the project's history.

For this reason, I'm changing the mtPaint article's terminology back to that used by the rest of the project, for the sake of not confusing potential readers. Articles should not reflect personal naming differences between editorss; we should use one term or the other consistently throughout the encyclopedia.

Welcome, by the way. Your work on this article is appreciated. Chris Cunningham (talk) 11:27, 4 January 2008 (UTC)

I could care less about "consensus" of nontechnical fanboys; in programming, like in other engineering disciplines, right and wrong isn't decided by popular vote. And the technical distinction is very obvious to a coder.

See, userspace code doesn't call into kernel directly - it calls the libraries instead. And the foundational library on any Unix system is libc.

From userspace program's standpoint, the difference between "operating systems" is the difference between featuresets of the respective libc's; no more, no less. And mtPaint in particular is written to, and debugged on, MSVCRT.DLL on Windows, and GNU libc on Linux - and just happens to be compatible with BSD libc too at the moment. Technically, mtPaint should be able to run on GNU/BSD, GNU/Hurd and GNU/OpenSolaris just the same as on GNU/Linux, and not know the difference - but is unlikely to run on, say, uClinux without some tweaking.

Just like one doesn't call Wine "Linux" just because it happens to be able to run on (some of) Linux-based OSes, one should not rename GNU system into "Linux" for that reason. Still, you're partially right - the more precise OS designation for mtPaint will be "GNU system (for example GNU/Linux)".

Dmitry Groshev (talk) 01:52, 6 January 2008 (UTC)

Passing commentary on sources

This edit summary:

Removing useful data just because you can is no better than any other kind of vandalism

isn't very constructive. Firstly, there's a big line between content disputes and vandalism, and editors who accuse people of vandalising articles because they make edits they disagree usually find it difficult to work constructively on article creation in the long run. Secondly, the comments in question are obviously personal opinion, and Wikipedia doesn't allow that. There's no way for a reader to know whether the person leaving said comments knows what he's talking about, and readers can't be expected to go Googling the user names of the editors in the page history to verify this. Chris Cunningham (talk) 13:47, 6 January 2008 (UTC)