Quotes of the week [LWN.net]

One of the primary reasons why I started the kernel summit ten years ago was because I've found that people work better after they have had a chance to meet each other face to face. If you only know someone via e-mail, it's lot easier to get into flame wars. But after you've met someone, broken bread and drunk beer with them, it's easier to work with them as a colleague and fellow developer. While the Linux Kernel development community has grown significantly since March, 2001, this principle still holds true.

-- Ted Ts'o

This is one reason why I wrote the ARM Linux kernel booting document some 8 years ago, which specifies the _minimum_ of information that a boot loader needs to supply the kernel needs to be able to boot. Fat lot of good that did - as far as I'm concerned, writing documentation is a total and utter waste of my time and resources. It just gets ignored.

So I now just don't bother with any documentation _at_ _all_.

-- Russell King

My gut reaction to this sort of thing is "run away in terror". It encourages kernel developers to operate like lackadaisical userspace developers and to assume that underlying code can perform heroic and immortal feats. But it can't. This is the kernel and the kernel is a tough and hostile place and callers should be careful and defensive and take great efforts to minimise the strain they put upon other systems.

-- Andrew Morton

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Quotes of the week

Posted Jul 29, 2010 6:22 UTC (Thu) by thedevil (subscriber, #32913) [Link]

It would be useful to know what is "this sort of thing" Morton's writing about. I read the original email but still it is not clear.

Quotes of the week

Posted Jul 29, 2010 9:03 UTC (Thu) by hawk (subscriber, #3195) [Link]

To me it seems that "this sort of thing" refers to the whole "virtually indexed array" concept, not something specific about the implementation.

Quotes of the week

Posted Jul 29, 2010 19:46 UTC (Thu) by smitty_one_each (subscriber, #28989) [Link]

@Russell,
Now, documentation, as a variation on the theme of education, is like throwing fertilizer against a wall: ~18% sticks.
While I don't dispute your point that the documentation is ignored, there is an osmotic absorption that improves matters over time.

Quotes of the week

Posted Jul 29, 2010 20:32 UTC (Thu) by martinfick (subscriber, #4455) [Link]

Yes, but this "osmotic absorption" is only a valid reason to do something if the rate is high enough compared to the alternatives (and there are always alternatives).