On Tue, Mar 26, 2013 at 09:00:39PM +0400, Franco Fichtner wrote: > On Mar 26, 2013, at 6:26 PM, Creamy <cre...@nocrater.com> wrote: > > >> but I honestly question the utility of any of these ISA > >> network and SCSI drivers. > > > > Perhaps somebody who is new to coding might be able to learn something > > from them? > > There is such a vast amount of code in the different BSD flavours > alone that it becomes very unlikely someone will stumble upon ISA > code bits, especially if one is a novice programmer. And how many > of those are old enough to have seen what ISA looks like nowadays?
I can see your reasoning, but I was thinking more along the lines of old school coders who are perhaps alien to unix systems programming, and/or C in general. Maybe there aren't as many of them around as I imagined. > Looking at diffs which remove ISA relevant stuff is probably the only > time they will see it -- that's educational *and* teducational at the > same time. Sorry for the bad pun. On reflection, it's not a good reason in itself to keep them in the tree. > > Looking to the future, when are we going to drop 486 support, anyway? > > Now, that's a more interesting thing ask. How much of the hardware survives now, anyway? I mean at least the old Vaxen were, (and are), maintainable. 486 motherboard dies, what do you do? Chances are it's a multi-layer pcb, so if traces go bad within it, a repair is going to be almost impossible. On Tue, Mar 26, 2013 at 12:18:03PM -0400, Ted Unangst wrote: > On Tue, Mar 26, 2013 at 14:26, Creamy wrote: > > >> but I honestly question the utility of any of these ISA > >> network and SCSI drivers. > > > > Perhaps somebody who is new to coding might be able to learn something > > from them? > > The last thing this world needs is more programmers who learned to > code by reading old unmaintained ISA drivers. Try to see both sides of it though, for somebody like myself who has a background in embedded systems, and learned to code by writing z80 assembler. When I first came to unix systems programming and C in general, I could follow the logical flow of what I was reading, even though I couldn't write a line of compatible code myself, (some would say I still can't ;-) ). I learned a lot by looking at things like drivers for Hercules mono cards, which basically consisted of mode setting and a dumb framebuffer. I doubt whether today's generation in a similar situation would learn much from looking at any of the code for the latest ATI or Nvidia cards. -- Creamy
