Messages in this thread | | | From | (Alan Cox) | Subject | Re: 2.2.2: 2 thumbs up from lm | Date | Fri, 26 Feb 1999 01:05:28 +0000 (GMT) |
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> > they are afraid that thier patches will be rejected. This is bad. > > I have a feeling that a UNIX v6 filesystem would be rejected, so why > > would I bother to write it? > > There is life beyond the official kernel distribution. So many things > can be built as modules and don't need to be in the kernel. > I'm more than happy if some of my stuff lives on sunsite and at least > some people like it.
Thats also a bad example. A V6 fs has no impact on the rest of the code. Thats actually an important criteria in two senses
For a driver "How much non specific code do I touch" - If its just to add my_setup, entries in /proc and call to the initialiser function this is good. - If it redesigns pieces of the memory manager expect to have to do a lot of justification
An example here is the IRDA layer which went in just before 2.2. It went in because it added only 3 or 4 lines of code to the kernel other than its own code. That is it doesnt impact other layers - it being good clean code helped too of course
For a new subsystem the same applies - If a user needs to add little code to add a driver to the subsystem its good - If the interfaces are clear and modular to help this it is good
Free Software slightly re-invents the Software Engineering model in the sense that because the module is modifiable its better to be clean and cover the cases you understand not an all encompassing "reusable object". Since you aren't shipping another bunch of people a dead binary brick, you can let them handle stuff you completely missed. At the same time they modularity, clean expandability stuff is very important.
I've actually got a V7fs code set lying here as pieces for SYS51K. Unfortunatelyits author recycled it by accident so there is an extant paper copy only. But it did its job. It rescued something of great historic interest from an old disk. More on that when people are ready to announce it ..
Alan
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