Messages in this thread |  | | Date | Mon, 4 Sep 2000 19:57:41 -0700 | From | "David S. Miller" <> | Subject | Re: [ANNOUNCE] Withdrawl of Open Source NDS Project/NTFS/M2FS for Linux |
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Date: Tue, 5 Sep 2000 01:13:51 +0100 (BST) From: Alan Cox <alan@lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk>
> This is why Linus does not allow a debugging facility like this into > the kernel, so people spend time _thinking_ when they go hunting down > bugs.
I spend my time thinking. But I prefer to spend it thinking about the bug not about finding it and how long fsck takes. There are only a few things I think Linus is a complete loon about 8) but the debugging stuff is one.
I disagree, for the cases where I cannot for some reason reproduce the bug with / mounted read-only, the time it spends fsck'ing I spend _thinking_ about what possible causes are _instead_ of taping on the keyboard like a monkey.
By the time the fsck completes, very often my brain has quiped "oh duh, yeah it's probably x and y doing z" and I'm in the home stretch of fully verifying the true cause of the bug.
Seriously, this is one area where I am so happy we don't have fancy kernel debuggers in there by default. Fancy debuggers encourage the programmer to engage in behaviorology research, and _not_ in finding the true cause of a bug and fixing it properly.
I take much comfort in the fact that 2 hackers who have been debugging programms probably longer that I have been alive (Kernighan and Pike) agree with me. See chapter 5 of their book "The Practice of Programming". Note in particular the second paragraph on page 119.
Profiling and performance monitoring tools, they are useful too, but also as a seperate patch.
Later, David S. Miller davem@redhat.com - 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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