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Quote of the weekQuote of the weekPosted Oct 15, 2006 13:17 UTC (Sun) by tlw (guest, #31237)In reply to: Quote of the week by ebiederm Parent article: Quote of the week > As for political clout to get a driver in, in most cases all it takes is a little bravery. Either you are making one of the funniest Linux-related jokes I've ever heard, or you are conveniently ignoring and sugar-coating the hundreds of flame wars that take place regularly on LKML. If it were simply a matter of changing an identifier here and moving a comma there I could agree with you. But in most cases trying to submit a driver results in a difference of opinion regarding the design of the submitted code; and the only way to win a design discussion is with large amounts of clout. Is there an empirical way to absolutely prove one design is better than another? Absolutely not. Design decisions are always a matter of personal taste: some designs solve some problems better and other designs solve other problems better. Additionally, when you consider that all these "design discussions (now I'm sugar-coating!)" are done out in the open on mailing lists that are backed-up for all eternity on millions of hard disks around the planet and taking into consideration the large number of these discussions which degenerate into flame wars and name calling (sprinkled with explicatives, to taste)... well, let's just say that takes a whole lot of "bravery". :-) If you want to test my theory please email Linus, CC'ing LKML, and try explaining to him that the Hurd kernel is a much better design than his monolithic kernel. Or email LKML explaining that you've reviewed the design of the ReiserFS and found it better than ext3. Or email GregKH (CC:LKML) informing him that devfs is better than sysfs and therefore it should not be removed from the kernel because you want to continue using it. Just because they say their designs are better doesn't mean they're better for you.
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Quote of the week Posted Oct 16, 2006 10:01 UTC (Mon) by dwmw2 (subscriber, #2063) [Link] If it were simply a matter of changing an identifier here and moving a comma there I could agree with you. But in most cases trying to submit a driver results in a difference of opinion regarding the design of the submitted code; and the only way to win a design discussion is with large amounts of clout. No. The way to win a design discussion is with a good design. And thats why your examples about Hurd, Reiserfs and devfs are so clearly bogus. Youre right that there is a large element of personal taste involved. But unless a design is actually bad you wont normally be held ransom to others taste if you can justify your own. One of the good things about Linux development is that it goes largely on the merit of the code, and political clout plays a relatively small part in it.
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