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SubjectRe: [ANNOUNCE] Withdrawl of Open Source NDS Project/NTFS/M2FS forLinux
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.
-
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