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Quotes of the week

You know, I'm -><- that close to posting a highly unprintable rant about hooks in general, associated style of development and resulting problems. With names named and *many* examples given.

LSM is essentially a trashcan and just about everything icky gets swept over there. That's fine, as long as one doesn't care whether their code makes sense and just wants to keep it away from unfriendly eyes.

-- Al Viro
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Quotes of the week

Posted Feb 12, 2010 11:48 UTC (Fri) by xav (guest, #18536) [Link]

Too bad. I enjoy Al's "energetic" prose when he tries to teach good taste in kernel programming.

Quotes of the week

Posted Feb 16, 2010 12:14 UTC (Tue) by mdz@debian.org (subscriber, #14112) [Link]

Why is this kind of behavior glorified by the kernel community?

Quotes of the week

Posted Apr 17, 2010 14:53 UTC (Sat) by dmag (subscriber, #17775) [Link]

Because we value good code over people's feelings.

Quotes of the week

Posted Apr 17, 2010 16:59 UTC (Sat) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

Also, because Al's rants are a pile of fun to read even if you're on the receiving end? They're never dull...

Quotes of the week

Posted Apr 19, 2010 12:30 UTC (Mon) by nye (guest, #51576) [Link]

Which is, of course, a short-term optimisation at best.

Quotes of the week

Posted Apr 19, 2010 18:04 UTC (Mon) by dmag (subscriber, #17775) [Link]

I tend to think the reverse. I hope the code will be around longer than any one person. Remember, the main job of Linus and his lieutenants is not so much to write code, but to reject code in order to prevent the quality from going down. Adding features that make the code hard to maintain is not a win.

In fact, it's possible to "fix" the grumpiness problem (by submitting drivers to a 3rd party, who then interfaces with the Linux maintainers), but it's much harder to "fix" the problem of bad code leaking into the kernel. (Broken Windows theory.)

I can personally attest that the Linux source is a joy to use (the platform support is basically "object-oriented" code in C), compared to several other embedded systems I've worked with (pre-processor macro hell).

It may well be that we'd be better off overall if people were less grumpy. But I, for one, am loath to touch the Goose that lays the Golden Eggs. (Or even to tell the Goose how to do it's job.)

Quotes of the week

Posted Apr 20, 2010 13:04 UTC (Tue) by nye (guest, #51576) [Link]

Yes, but this is a local optimum. It weed out some rubbish now, but removes additional chances of something even better - unless one holds the theory that every programmer capable of producing good code is also willing to persevere despite being treated badly, which I don't believe is by any means a universally held opinion.

>But I, for one, am loath to touch the Goose that lays the Golden Eggs. (Or even to tell the Goose how to do it's job.)

Indeed, I'm not going to be trying to persuade anyone on LKML how to act, but I nevertheless hold the personal wish that people would consider being less unpleasant to each other in general.

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