Messages in this thread | | | Date | Tue, 05 Sep 2000 13:48:22 +0200 | From | Martin Dalecki <> | Subject | Re: [ANNOUNCE] Withdrawl of Open Source NDS Project/NTFS/M2FS forLinux |
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Ingo Molnar wrote: > > On Tue, 5 Sep 2000, Andi Kleen wrote: > > > My point was basically that omitting useful debugging tools makes it > > not any less likely that people use the (A) strategy (easy fix instead > > of real understanding). For some people it is so painfull to work with > > raw dumps that they want to get out of that pain as quickly as > > possible, like with just adding an if (!ptr) return; and be done with > > it. > > well, they will sooner or later notice that it's easier to fix bugs by > following the development of the kernel and understanding the underlying > principles and the code. As elitist as it might seem, we rather need 10 > highly skilled developers who understand the kernel than 100 moderately > skilled ones who know how to operate a kernel debugger and barely anything > else. [this is not an insult towards people with less experience - having > less experience is just a temporary stage of a process, nothing else. But > if it becomes the end station thats a problem IMHO.] > > Ingo
There is a nice discussion about the online-debugging vers. the "doing it the hard way" approach in some software engineering books out there. (Sorry I don't have them here at hand, so I can't give an exact refference - it was either the famous "Mythical Man Month" or "Warum is Software so Teuer und andere Mythen der Informationstechnologie" by some other guy whose name I don't remember ;-). However I'm quite sure someone here will remember it well...
Basically in the book I have in mind the author was describing the result's of a spinoff company from IBM which was trying to make some money on the added facility of "heart surgery" to some early IBM OS. (IBM did release them just for the price of a symbolic 1$)/ Basically after some time they have realized that yes casual debugging was easier and more productive, but after long the statistical view showed that the code quality was rather degrading by using on the fly debuggers instead of improving. --- Sometimes the obvious isn't the RIGHT THING becouse most of the time the easy fixes are just band aids hiding the trough problems. Therefore I would rather like to back-up the position of Ingo.
And finally I would like to emphasize that every singe additional facility doesn't come free - It's adding complexity which is a source of possible problems in itself. - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
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