Re: [git pull] x86 changes for v2.6.27

From: H. Peter Anvin
Date: Mon Jul 14 2008 - 16:58:23 EST


Linus Torvalds wrote:

Things like this _really_ irritate me:

Memtest (MEMTEST) [Y/n/?] (NEW) ?

why the hell is that defaulting to "on"?

The rule of thumb should be:

NO NEW FEATURES SHOULD _EVER_ DEFAULT TO 'ON'!

I do realize that developers always think that _their_ particular cool new feature is so important that it should default to 'on', but that's always the case, and it's _always_ wrong.


I'm a bit surprised that you'd say that for something that is a hardware-testing feature that needs a command-line option to be enabled at runtime. I have always presumed that the default value is the recommended value, and I would think that that is what most people would assume.

-hpa
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