IMHO that idea is really "code" for elitism. (no offense to you Florian,
i've seen this idea expressed many times on this list).
"You have to be this high to hack the kernel?"
(This is a play on the Far Side cartoon, with the sign "You have to be
this tall to attack city", and a dejected looking monster who's too
short turning away from the metropolis.)
yes, the defect rate of Linux is remarkable considering there are few
debugging tools available. but i think the reason it is so low is because
the lack of debugging tools *prevents* people from getting involved and
fixing problems, so *only* the experts can fix problems. preventing a
flood of fixes and modifications helps keep the change rate lower, and
limits the amount of parallel work that can proceed on the kernel. but
there is still a control issue here, whether overt or not.
Actually, it's more than just only letting experts fix problems. More
importantly, it means that (for the most part) discourages non-experts
from writing new kernel code. This is not necessarily a bad thing; I've
personally been in projects where new code (to add new features) which
had been "donated" to the project ended up doing more harm than good in
the long term, because the donated code was badly designed or
implemented.
Surely quality is more important than quantity in terms of amount of
code (or features) added to the kernel. Or do people think that Windows
2000 with its 35-40 million lines of code and bloat is a good thing? :-)
- Ted
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