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From: "William A. Maniatty" <maniatty@cs.albany.edu>
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Date: Mon, 24 Jan 2000 02:44:43 -0500
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To: chuckr@picnic.mat.net, maniatty@cs.albany.edu
Subject: Re: Learning the FreeBSD Kernel
Cc: FreeBSD-doc@freebsd.org, asmodai@wxs.nl,
	freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org, grog@lemis.com, maniattb@cs.rpi.edu,
	msmith@freebsd.org
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Hi There:

Chuck Robey Writes:
>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.

Ah!  I wasn't aware of this.  I would be somewhat thin skinned too,
too many requests for a free lunch can be a problem.  On the other hand
I still think: (i) I'd still like my student to take a crack at it,
since he would pick up some understanding of kernel programming by doing it
(a good thing!) (ii) the project might help motivated (and good) people
pick up FreeBSD kernel programming and (iii) people can be pointed to
the manual and told to return if they have a specific question.

Regards:

Bill Maniatty


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