As the article points out, changes to the internal kernel code tend to get much more scrutiny than those that affect user-visible interfaces, despite the fact that those are the ones that really need to be right from the start. That comes out as sloppy, but is really more a sign of a development process in the need of improvement.
When we suffer from badly thought-out APIs made by Microsoft, say, we pour scorn over the developers who designed the mess and call them incompetent, fairly or not. Linux kernel programmers are not exempt and should not be.
Posted Oct 24, 2012 10:51 UTC (Wed) by mkerrisk (editor, #1978)
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That comes out as sloppy, but is really more a sign of a development process in the need of improvement.
Yes. Having watched what goes on for quite a while now, I consider this mainly a process problem, rather than a problem of individual developers (though obviously some do a better job than others).
EPOLL_CTL_DISABLE, epoll, and API design
Posted Oct 25, 2012 9:45 UTC (Thu) by dgm (subscriber, #49227)
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A good start would be to find out how is that some do a better job that others, and how we can get that to happen more often.