Linus Torvalds wrote:
>
> It's not whether you can use tools to do the work.
>
> It's about what kind of people you get.
This makes a lot of sense. Stop there and you are done. But...
> ...in the end, maybe the rule to only use hand power makes sense. Not
> because hand-power is _better_. But because it brings in the kind of
> people who love to work with their hands, who love to _feel_ the wood with
> their fingers, and because of that their holes are not always perfectly
> aligned, not always at the same place. The kind of carpenter that looks at
> the grain of the wood, and allows the grain of the wood to help form the
> finished product.
This argument would make a lot more sense if we were still building
wooden airplanes. But our wooden airplane is already built, and it
flys great. Now we are going on to build a metal airplane which we
hope will fly higher and faster. Yes, the old tools and techniques
still work, but they aren't necessarily well-suited to the task.
Arguing that hand tools are somehow better than power tools is... just
an argument. It does not matter which kind of tool is better, because
both are available. In contrast, the social engineering part does
matter - after all, would you want to attract someone to kernel
development who refused to use a tool just because it didn't come
pre-installed? And look at the quality of the people now working on
the kernel - something has been done right.
The result of this thread is that at least one participant (Jeff) has
been inspired to build a new-and-better kernel debugger for Linux. If
that work comes to fruition (1) I will most happily use it and (2) the
discussion was worth it. I don't give a rat's fuzzy behind who won
the argument.
-- Daniel - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Fri Sep 15 2000 - 21:00:13 EST