Re: 2.1.118 Tons of oopes

Simon Kenyon (simon@koala.ie)
Sun, 30 Aug 1998 15:20:14 +0100


> Don't be stupid. I'm not talking about conspiracies. I'm saying that
> the inner circle do no communicate effectively with others. Things
> that may seem obvious to them are not necessarily obvious to other
> bright hackers who aren't in "the club".
>
> The kernel gurus are irritating an increasing number of people by not
> communicating effectively and behaving in an arrogant and
> condescending way. If one of them had simply taken the time to clearly
> explain their reasoning and showing how they thought my reasoning was
> flawed, this thread would have been much shorter.

i suspect that if anybody else had asked they might have got a more reasonable
answer

linus gets to call the shots because he wrote the original linux
i have no idea what percentage of the kernel is still "his", but i don't see
any support for a change in the status quo

if i had written a driver i could understand how the change might have pissed
me off - but only for a short while

it seems fairly obvious to me why the structure was changed, well in principal
if not in this case
the idea that all structures can only be added to at the end is something that
is a bad rut to get yourself into
it leads to crappy and bloated coding in the name of "backwards compatability"
reasonable amounts of backwards compability is good, but one NULL is not going
to kill anyone.

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