> On Mon, 14 Jul 1997, Steven N. Hirsch wrote:
>
> > I almost guarantee that 10% more effort put into documentation and
> > commenting would reap great rewards in terms of contributed input from the
> > community at large. Then, you CAN go off and design and implement the
> > "latest and greatest" - AFTER having paved the way for others to maintain
> > and fine-tune the previous "latest and greatest".
>
> IMHO, it takes more effort to document the code than to write it. That's my
> experience with kernel hacking (and I touched a lot of the Linux/m68k kernel
> code). So your 10% rule is not correct (and as a professional developer,
> shouldn't you know that documentation is the hardest part? :-)
Oh absolutely true. I never meant to imply that 10% more time would
result in complete documentation <g>. Just trying to get a point
across..
> And the `real' kernel hackers have so much to do, and so many new ideas, that
> they'd rather do what they like most: i.e. turning ideas into new code...
And they do that well. I would be glad to document kernel source -
problem is that I don't know what the h*ll is going on in most places!
In another message, Alan Cox implies that something might be coming down
the pike from O'Reilly. I bought a copy of Linux Kernel Internals, and it
was of some value (if a bit dated). Perhaps it's time for a re-read of
that and "Modern Unix Internals".
Just so hard to get that first foot in the door!
Steve