[ILUG] OOM discussion...

[Paul Jakma]

On Thu, 9 Mar 2000, John P. Looney wrote:

>  An honourable goal. But "all-costs" shouldn't include a four-year big
> whopping bug should it ?

well, from the kernel point of view it's not a bug. :)

(but this point is starting to sound like the scene with the vultures in
Disney's Jungle Book)

> Or the fact that the OS was nearly ten years old,
> by the time it got complete PCMCIA support, because Linus didn't like the
> functional implementation that he was offered ?
> 

Eh? It wasn't that Linus didn't like it - it was that /David Hinds/
didn't want pcmcia to be incorporated into the codebase. 

So eventually Linus got fed up and wrote his own kernel stubs for
pcmcia. (not sure, but i think david hinds has now moved his code into
the framework provided by linus).

same thing with USB. Some spanish guy had been working on USB for a year
or more, but the code never went near Linus. So linus got fed up (around
the end of 2.1) and wrote his own USB framework, and lots of people
started working on that, and that code is now a lot further than the
spanish guys USB stack ever was.

Linus just plain does not like large portions of code to be developed
seperately from linux. Be it ISDN, PCMCIA, USB whatever.. he gets pissed
off..

>  It's a good idea, but Linus takes it too far sometimes.
> 

no, i don't think he does. Linus /needs/ to be an arrogant anal
retentive, or else the kernel would get filled up with crap. We'd have a
beast crammed with numerous well-intentioned but ill-conceived ideas,
we'd have in kernel sound mixing, 3D, etc.. And linux would fall over
within a couple of years.

eg look at devfs. Devfs is (IMO) a good idea, and richard gooch's
implementation of it seems (to my badly trained eyes anyway) to be
reasonably clean. Yet it took over a year of hard slogging to get it
into the kernel. 

But i'm glad that it took so much effort to have devfs accepted, cause
it reassures me that that is what it takes to have code included in
linux.

>  But only if you need to ? If another OS was better, full stop, would you
> move ? 
> 

depends how much better. Eg NT is still better than Linux for some
high-end stuff, but i'm sure i wouldn't use it. :) 

 
> Kate
> 
>