Date: Tue, 2 Feb 1999 13:12:02 +0000 From: Tony Finch <dot@dotat.at> To: current@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: btokup().. patch to STYLE(9) (fwd) Message-ID: <E107fcY-0006IY-00@fanf.noc.demon.net> In-Reply-To: <99Feb2.070121est.40330@border.alcanet.com.au>
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Peter Jeremy <peter.jeremy@auss2.alcatel.com.au> wrote: >Someone wrote: >> >> "You are not supposed to understand this." > >I'd suggest that there's a vast difference in the intended audience >of the code containing the above comment and FreeBSD. Not to mention >a 20+ year gap in time. > >Whilst the official codebase may be under the control of a select >group of committers, the code should be capable of being understood by >anyone who is reasonably proficient with C. If understanding the >kernel requires that you be a guru-level expert in C, then people >won't bother. FreeBSD will wind up being a small collection of >people trying to outdo each other in obtuseness. Don't be silly. FreeBSD is much more complicated than V6 for a whole lot of reasons that are independent of who gets to read the code and who gets to change it. Just as a starting point, the kernel has about a million lines of code compared to V6's ten thousand lines; Lions' comment about 10000 lines being a comfortable amount of code for one person to understand comes to mind. The x86 architecture is vastly more complicated and baroque than the PDP11. We now have paging and networking and SMP and a whole lot of other sophisticated stuff that were completely beyond V6. The magic of swtch() is written in assembler, not C. On the other hand, what we have that the early Unix community didn't have is the Internet. We can collaborate with email, we can browse the code history with CVS, and generally benefit from a far greater level of support. Tony. -- f.a.n.finch dot@dotat.at fanf@demon.net To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-current" in the body of the message
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