Re: Greg's Decree! (was Re: Linus' decrees?)

[Valdis . Kletnieks]

On Thu, 24 Feb 2005 17:08:33 EST, Stuart MacDonald said:

> So what I'm wondering is, is there a location on the net where Linus'
> statements about how the kernel is to be are collected? ie, Where the
> above statements could all be found, with cites.

Your kernel source came with 3 files in the Documentation/ directory:
CodingStyle, SubmittingDrivers, and SubmittingPatches.  That's probably
as close to an official "how the kernel is to be" as you will find.

Remember that Linus has *always* reserved the right to change his mind
if a "sufficiently good" idea came along.  So it's not as much a "The Emperor
Penguin Has Decreed" as "Nobody's made a sufficiently convincing case to Linus".
(And I've never seen Linus claim to be totally consistent on what qualifies as
"sufficiently" - he can be a lot more stubborn about some things and flexible on
on others)

And remember that Linus has a source tree, but so do many others. There's
been lots of stuff that's made appearances elsewhere - the -mm tree has had
enough different schedulers that totally ripped out the innards of something
as basic as the scheduler that a 'plugsched' patch showed up.  I'm personally
convinced we've not seen the last of the reiser4 "file as directory" concept, and
that somebody will do a sane version at the VFS level where it belongs.  There's
a whole bunch of other in-flight code that would be totally against a "how the
kernel shall be" document of just 2 years ago.

Another thread mentioned the kernelnewbies fortunes file:
http://www.kernelnewbies.org/kernelnewbies-fortunes.tar.gz

That's probably as close to an official document as you're likely to find.
And the fact that it's in the format of a fortunes file says a lot about
the mindset of the kernel hacking community, in a Zen koan sort of way.

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