Re: [Q]: Linux and real device drivers

Nat Lanza (magus@cs.cmu.edu)
26 Sep 1999 00:00:12 -0400


David Hinds <dhinds@zen.stanford.edu> writes:

> One suggestion would be to have a set of man pages included in the
> kernel tree. And try to make them sufficiently useful that people
> would want to keep them up to date. In this case, I think adding to
> the kernel tree would be a good thing, because it keeps the
> documentation in the same place as what it is documenting. I'd be
> willing to write man pages for a few things myself. The current
> documentation in the kernel tree is a bit too informal and incomplete.

I'd love this. The other thing that I'd love is some more
documentation on API changes. Moving my filesystem code from 2.2.3 to
2.2.12 was annoying because I had to spend a while searching mailing
list archives to figure out why the VFS and dcache interface changes
happened and whether I'd have to do anything tricky to make my code
work. Sure, I could have spent a lot of time reading everything on
linux-kernel and taking careful notes of everything that might be
relevant, but I'd really rather spend my time actually writing code.

If a change is important enough to require changing an interface in a
release cycle, it's also important enough to document what changed,
why, and how to update old code.

--nat

-- 
nat lanza --------------------- research programmer, parallel data lab, cmu scs
magus@cs.cmu.edu -------------------------------- http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~magus/
there are no whole truths; all truths are half-truths -- alfred north whitehead

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