Date: Thu, 30 Jan 1997 11:50:10 +1030 (CST) From: Michael Smith <msmith@atrad.adelaide.edu.au> To: mcgovern@spoon.beta.com (Brian J. McGovern) Cc: hackers@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Constructive criticism (was: bashing everyone for fun and profit) Message-ID: <199701300120.LAA24028@genesis.atrad.adelaide.edu.au> In-Reply-To: <199701290249.VAA04040@spoon.beta.com> from "Brian J. McGovern" at "Jan 28, 97 09:49:02 pm"
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Brian J. McGovern stands accused of saying: > I've been noticing, more an more, that FreeBSD has been/is being > divided in to two camps. Basically, the "has", and the "has > not". What I mean by this, is that there appears to be the core > team, who kick butt making this stuff all work, then the people like > me, who'd like to help out where they can, but seem to have an > incredible time getting started. This is called the "learning curve". There are two ways to climb it, for climb it you must if you want to do anything. 1) Spend lots of time trying, asking questions, exercising your intelligence and patience. 2) Give lots of money to someone else to have them force you through 1). The "have/have not" stance, in this case, is sour grapes because you haven't made it up yet. There isn't some cabal trying to keep you ignorant and frustrated - developers are desperately desired! Case 2) really only manifests when there are lots of people desperate to climb and stupid enough to part with the sort of money involved, which isn't the case with FreeBSD. > you can't beam armies up to your ship, but I digress... I'd like to > submit it in to the "games" section of the ports. However, I notice > this great little file structure that allows you to type "make > install clean", and bam! the application is made, installed, and the > working space is cleaned up. It's in the handbook, in the section on ports. It looks like a cookbook to me. Or perhaps you could look at a few other ones that might be similar to yours - learn by example? > The second major area of concern in my eyes is device > drivers. Someone pointed me to a section of handbook that dealt with > doing it (supposedly), but it was terribly out of date. Back to If you can't work out how device drivers are integrated, I seriously doubt that you're up to writing one in the first place. 8( However, I'll note that I've been helping people learning DD writing for a while now (not that I'm any expert at it either), and I've never seen your name attached to a question going past. How are you supposed to learn if you never _ask_? > I guess what I'm getting at is this: There are a lot of us out here > who would write man pages if we knew how to typeset them, those who > would write neat utilities if we knew how to poll the information > from the kernel (hell, I know about zillion people who'd love to > know how to pull IO/up-down, config statistics from their Ethernet > interfaces, for instance), those who would write drivers for widget > X if they knew how to get them in to the kernel (there are a million > books on writing drivers, but none that I know of that speak > especially about FreeBSD)... I hate to say it, but I think that the right line for you is "there are a lot of us out here that like to whine about doing stuff because it requires some effort, and we're socialised to expect everything handed to us on a platter covered with disclaimers". _prove_me_wrong_ : I (and plenty of others) are willing to help you achieve your goals. It's why we're here. > Them: There isn't any. Try looking at <insert some piece of obscure, already > out of date code here>. > > Me: <gives up> Looks like I'm right so far. Go for it. Please? -- ]] Mike Smith, Software Engineer msmith@gsoft.com.au [[ ]] Genesis Software genesis@gsoft.com.au [[ ]] High-speed data acquisition and (GSM mobile) 0411-222-496 [[ ]] realtime instrument control. (ph) +61-8-8267-3493 [[ ]] Unix hardware collector. "Where are your PEZ?" The Tick [[
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