Re: serial.c

From: Theodore Y. Ts'o (tytso@MIT.EDU)
Date: Thu May 11 2000 - 16:51:20 EST


   Date: Thu, 11 May 2000 13:18:44 -0500
   From: Ed Carp <erc@pobox.com>

   This sort of elitist attitude really irritates me. "I am the God of
   Whatever Driver, and Ye Shalt Come And Worship At My Feet". If
   kernel development isn't supposed to be easy, then I guess from that
   perspective Linus is a complete fraud and a wimp because he didn't
   write the base kernel in machine language. Kernel development is by
   no means a piece of cake, but it should be no harder than absolutely
   necessary.

   Kernel development should be supportive of new people coming in, not
   trying to shut them out.

... and the attitude of people telling volunteers that they should be
spending their precious time working on whatever the whiner is
complaining about (whether it's kernel documentation, or half-duplex
support, et. al), is just as irritating.....

If you don't like the state of kernel documentation, well, then write
some! Send me a patch!

                                                        - Ted

P.S. I'll note, though, that adding comments of the form

        /*
         * Add one to cobol
         */
        cobol++;

Doesn't necessary make the code easier to read. It's better to optimize
comments for readiability of those people who *are* willing to spend a
little bit of time understanding the module, since those are the ones
which are most likely to give us usable patches. Some duffer which
expects to pick up the VM code in Linux, and understand it all in 15
minutes is not someone whom I'll going to trust take patches from
blindly!

-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@vger.rutgers.edu
Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/



This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Mon May 15 2000 - 21:00:18 EST