From owner-freebsd-hackers Wed Jun 30 13:28:13 1999 Delivered-To: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org Received: from nothing-going-on.demon.co.uk (nothing-going-on.demon.co.uk [193.237.89.66]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id E2D9015646 for ; Wed, 30 Jun 1999 13:27:56 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from nik@nothing-going-on.demon.co.uk) Received: (from nik@localhost) by nothing-going-on.demon.co.uk (8.9.3/8.9.2) id VAA74140; Wed, 30 Jun 1999 21:01:04 +0100 (BST) (envelope-from nik) Date: Wed, 30 Jun 1999 21:01:03 +0100 From: Nik Clayton To: Constantine Shkolny Cc: "hackers@FreeBSD.ORG" Subject: Re: Microsoft performance (was: All this and documentation too? (was: cvs commit: src/sys/isa sio.c)) Message-ID: <19990630210102.A72675@catkin.nothing-going-on.org> References: <01BEBFCB.F95F6F00.stan@osgroup.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii X-Mailer: Mutt 0.95.4i In-Reply-To: <01BEBFCB.F95F6F00.stan@osgroup.com>; from Constantine Shkolny on Sat, Jun 26, 1999 at 12:03:59PM -0500 Organization: Nik at home, where there's nothing going on Sender: owner-freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG 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.OAA04029@apollo.backplane.com> on the committers@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 <375143b5@cs.colorado.edu> To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message