Why does this happen?

Why does this happen?

Posted Apr 26, 2007 12:29 UTC (Thu) by endecotp (guest, #36428)
Parent article: ELC: The embedded Linux nightmare

> 7,000-line driver became a much better 1,300-line driver

Let's consider why this happens. These people are not completely stupid. Yet rather than produce a 1300-line driver, they produced a 7000-line driver. It can only be that it wasn't obvious to them how to achieve what they wanted in 1300 lines: they have written 5700 lines of "unnecessary" stuff, probably because it was easier overall for them to do that than to understand how to do it "properly". I can think of two fundamental issues:

1. Kernel documentation needs to be better. (Or, the kernel design needs to be easier to understand so that it "works" with less documentation.)

2. Mailing lists need to be more attractive venues for discussion of this sort of thing. I'm not sure why they are currently not attractive to these developers, but it's clear that they aren't. If the fundamental issue is corporate privacy then there probably isn't much that can be done, but there may be other reasons. This could be a good subject for a research project....

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