Sorry it's taken me a while to reply to this; ironically, most of my time
has been spent on freebsd-doc recently.
On Sat, Jun 26, 1999 at 12:03:59PM -0500, Constantine Shkolny wrote:
> I've come to understanding that lack of documentation is probably one of
> the factors that keep the system healthy,
I've just spent five minutes trying to phrase a reply to this that manages
to convey my complete disagreement without resorting to profanity.
You're talking bollocks.
Sorry, I failed. I'm the lesser man for it, I know, and I can only pledge
to widen my reading (or buy a set of Shakesperean Insult Fridge Magnets)
so that it doesn't happen again.
> because it keeps the unskilled people away.
And it keeps the skilled people away.
You have two systems, one documented, one not. You're looking for something
to work on, but don't have a great deal of free time to spend.
Which one do you work on?
Matthew Dillon, a FreeBSD contributor who has been improving FreeBSD's
virtual memory subsystem, NFS implementation, and various other bits and
pieces, recently said (in <199906262123.oaa04...@apollo.backplane.com>
on the committ...@freebsd.org mailing list)
[...]
I guessed I freaked some people out when I declared that I wanted to
work on the VM system, discussions in the first few months went with
half of core talking to me like I didn't know jack when I do know at
least jack, but had to come up to speed on FreeBSDisms in the code
and the utter lack of documentation.
[...]
That quote is from part of a message on another topic (and one which is
off-topic for -hackers).
Matt's a very talented coder. But he still has to come up to speed on how
things have been done on the FreeBSD project, and how we've diverged from
published documentation (such as "The Design and Implementation") before
he can do useful work.
In this respect, Matt's one of the good guys. Not only has he done some
sterling coding, but he's also taken the time to contribute documentation
explaining not only what he's done, but also what other code in FreeBSD
does, and more importantly, *why it does it that way*.
N
--
[intentional self-reference] can be easily accommodated using a blessed,
non-self-referential dummy head-node whose own object destructor severs
the links.
-- Tom Christiansen in <37514...@cs.colorado.edu>
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