On Tue, 4 Apr 2000, Richard Gooch wrote:
> But it's not consistent. I'm not asking for dogma. If it's not written
> down somewhere (even if marked "in the opinion of the author"), then
> every new FS^H^Hpiece of code has to survive a trial by flamewar. And
> inevitably, the same old ground is covered each time. It's wasteful of
> the time of the people flaming, and it makes linux-kernel more
> voluminous, which leads to more people filtering it (or
> unsubscribing).
IMHO this flamage/trial by fire is a strength, not a weakness. Yes,
each "new" idea generates the same/similar arguments. However, it is
through the trial of the arguments that the ideas are tested and
retested to see if they are valid.
Certainly anything which has gone through the wringer more than once
deserves mention in the FAQ. If it generates identical arguments then
it deserves to be ignored. However, what about when someone says I
understand that a, b, and c were extensively discussed before, but here
is a new answer which I think invalidates some of the objections and
here is the code which demonstrates that.
Good/Bad/Indifferent ideas are certainly floatin around all over the
place. I've seen a number of them, and a percentage of those have
matured in their seperateness and eventually got included in the kernel.
vfat support and devfs are cases in point.
We also have the court of final authority in our benevolent dictator,
Linus Torvalds -- even if sometimes he claims to wear a brown bag. He's
said more than once, "I won't even consider X, so don't bother
submitting patches for it." Let's use that; such things also belong in
the FAQ. The system works well, even if it occasionally generates
numerous messages. That is what procmail recipies and the 'n' key are
for.
-
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 : Fri Apr 07 2000 - 21:00:15 EST