Messages in this thread | | | Date | Sat, 3 Jul 1999 00:21:15 -0400 | From | "Theodore Y. Ts'o" <> | Subject | Re: The stability crisis |
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Date: Fri, 2 Jul 1999 16:49:16 -0400 (EDT) From: Chuck Lever <cel@monkey.org>
IMHO that idea is really "code" for elitism. (no offense to you Florian, i've seen this idea expressed many times on this list).
"You have to be this high to hack the kernel?"
(This is a play on the Far Side cartoon, with the sign "You have to be this tall to attack city", and a dejected looking monster who's too short turning away from the metropolis.)
yes, the defect rate of Linux is remarkable considering there are few debugging tools available. but i think the reason it is so low is because the lack of debugging tools *prevents* people from getting involved and fixing problems, so *only* the experts can fix problems. preventing a flood of fixes and modifications helps keep the change rate lower, and limits the amount of parallel work that can proceed on the kernel. but there is still a control issue here, whether overt or not.
Actually, it's more than just only letting experts fix problems. More importantly, it means that (for the most part) discourages non-experts from writing new kernel code. This is not necessarily a bad thing; I've personally been in projects where new code (to add new features) which had been "donated" to the project ended up doing more harm than good in the long term, because the donated code was badly designed or implemented.
Surely quality is more important than quantity in terms of amount of code (or features) added to the kernel. Or do people think that Windows 2000 with its 35-40 million lines of code and bloat is a good thing? :-)
- Ted
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