On Tue, 22 Aug 2000, Eric S. Raymond wrote:
>
> You've ignored what I see as Rogier's main point. It's not "shared
> code means less bugs" per se, it's "shared code means better test
> coverage".
Testing only gets you so far.
And having a driver that handles everything under the sun can easily get
too complex - to the point where testing only shows that something is
wrong, and actually _fixing_ the bugs is getting to be the problem.
See Windows.
Or see the IDE driver. It's actually on it's second generation, and people
have talked about a third one. Supporting every IDE controller, whether it
is PCI or not, whether it can do DMA or not, is just fairly painful. To
the point where trying to fix one case tends to break another.
No, the serial driver is not there yet. Probably never will be. There just
isn't enough incentive for hardware people to do new things.
But the "common code helps" thing is WRONG. Face it. It can hurt. A lot.
And people shouldn't think it is the God of CS.
Linus
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Wed Aug 23 2000 - 21:00:07 EST