Subject: Re: _KERNEL_foo
To: Luke Mewburn <lukem@wasabisystems.com>
From: Chris G. Demetriou <cgd@sibyte.com>
List: tech-kern
Date: 12/15/2000 18:01:25
lukem@wasabisystems.com (Luke Mewburn) writes:
> On Fri, Dec 15, 2000 at 08:37:02AM -0500, John Kohl wrote:
> > >>>>> "Luke" == Luke Mewburn <lukem@wasabisystems.com> writes:
> > 
> > Luke> And as per usual in these situations, a couple of ideas are put up, no
> > Luke> one comments one way or another about one of the points (and get off
> > Luke> topic on the other point), you wait a couple of days and commit the
> > Luke> change (modulo some minor feedback),
> > 
> > Well, that's the problem: "a couple of days" is not really an adequate
> > review period (e.g. if people are traveling/at a conference, etc., they
> > may not be reading e-mail regularly).  Maybe a week or more would be
> > more reasonable.
> 
> For what I considered a really minor change, is waiting a week necessary?
> It's not like the change broke anything; it was more a stylistic issue.

It all depends on how you define "broke," of course.

As noted previously, it's not only unnecessary, but it doesn't behave
in the logically intuitive way, based on how kernel configs otherwise
behave.  It didn't actually cause kernel builds to fail, or something,
but it was ill-thought-out (in my opinion), and that makes it
"broken."

The true brokenness shows up later, when users start asking
questions about why it doesn't work as it should, and then it can't
easily be _removed_ because other changes depend on it.



[ the following is tangential to the original topic, certainly... but
hey, you brought it up. ]

I also don't think a week, for instance, was necessarily appropriate
to wait for discussion on this change.

However, if you're not going to wait for discussion, then you should
bloody well expect comment after the fact, and be willing to adjust
(or even remove, if appropriate) your change based on that.  In fact,
you did fix bugs in it based on feedback, no?  But the code's still
there, despite the fact that it's both unnecessary and potentially
(very) confusing.

There's also the fact that you even claimed that you'd waited 2 days
-- what you apparently thought was a reasonable time -- but indeed
waited less than half that...


[ and now back to the original topic. ]

I don't understand why this change is still in the source tree (except
maybe that you're expecting somebody else to go in and rip it out, if
that's to be done)...



cgd