Re: documenting the kernel

Andries.Brouwer@cwi.nl
Thu, 17 Jul 1997 21:20:21 +0200


Alan Cox:

: Just pick a bit of code and contribute docs, either to the Linux KHG
: or to comments/document files for the source tree. I'm happy to start
: checking them in and Im sure Linus won't object too much

I hope you check them for correctness and conciseness.

The interesting comments are global.
With well-chosen identifiers and a clean programming style
local comments are often superfluous.
Heavily commented code is not very readable.
But an incorrect comment can make finding a bug much harder;
without the comment one just reads the code, and sees a bug;
with the comment it requires mental effort to disregard it
while reading the code.

[In other words, I would prefer seeing the documentation go into
the KHG, and have comments written by the people who also wrote
the code.]

Andries