Date: Mon, 24 Jan 2000 02:28:23 -0500 (EST) From: Chuck Robey <chuckr@picnic.mat.net> To: "William A. Maniatty" <maniatty@cs.albany.edu> Cc: msmith@FreeBSD.ORG, FreeBSD-doc@FreeBSD.ORG, asmodai@wxs.nl, freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG, grog@lemis.com, maniattb@cs.rpi.edu Subject: Re: Learning the FreeBSD Kernel Message-ID: <Pine.BSF.4.21.0001240222190.315-100000@picnic.mat.net> In-Reply-To: <200001240716.CAA02016@richard.cs.albany.edu>
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On Mon, 24 Jan 2000, William A. Maniatty wrote: > Both Chuck Robey and Mike Smith have some points, but that won't > stop me from giving my opinion :-). Mike is correct that experience is > key to being a solid systems software developer, who writes device drivers. > Now the next question is how can someone get experience? By developing > systems software (which by the way they should only do if they have > experience at it :-)). > > Traditionally there are two approaches: > 1) Have a friend available and bug them for help when you get stuck :-) > 2) Read the documentation. > 3) Read the code and lose a whole lot of productivity without certainty > of figuring it out on your own. > 4) Dismiss the whole problem as unmanageable and throw your > weight behind a more productive project. I know where Mike's coming from. Wait until the next guy posts on the list "I don't really know how to program, but please tell what 'C' is, and how to write a device driver". We had a pretty nasty flamewar over that maybe (I think) 9 months ago, and it still hurts folks, to be accused of conceit, when the guy was asking a grossly unanswerable question, and wouldn't believe it couldn't be boiled down to a 4 paragraph "device drivers for dummies" thing. Mike wants to avoid dealing with a horde of folks like that. I can't really blame Mike, it's impossible to make people understand that you can't boil everything down to a 30 second sound bite. BUT I still wish there was a map to interfaces. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-doc" in the body of the message
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