Randy McMurchy wrote: > Richard A Downing wrote these words on 10/11/05 15:52 CST: > > >>Take tongue out of cheek. We are FAR better at keeping our >>documentation up to date than the Kernel Developers who would rather >>introduce a 'really neat bit of new code' than document the bloody >>important stuff they wrote last year. > > > Simply for the sake of discussion, let me pose a question. > > Certainly there is limited amount of time the kernel dev's have to > spend on the project. > > Would you rather that time be spent in documenting their work, or > developing new code and fixing bugs in old code? > > In a perfect world, or when you work for an employer, you must do > both. But in an open-source environment, this might not be feasible. > > Just a thought. >
I agree, you have a good point. However, it's real difficult to use undocumented stuff - e.g. udev last year - without at least some docos. I guess some people can read the code (or monitor all the various mailing lists)- but much of that is uncommented and hence quite hard to understand. When I was in control of software development at ICL, we said: 'Code without User Documentation doesn't exist' - docs first, then code was the rule. I recognise we can't insist on that in the volunteer-written software world - hell, WE can't insist on anything! (quite rightly) I think your penultimate para should read: 'when you work for an employer, he must pay for both'. Otherwise I hope he goes rapidly out of business. Richard. -- http://linuxfromscratch.org/mailman/listinfo/blfs-support FAQ: http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/faq.html Unsubscribe: See the above information page
