From owner-freebsd-hackers  Thu Jan 30 08:57:32 1997
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To: hackers@freebsd.org
Subject: Followup to criticism (was: Constructive criticism)
Date: Thu, 30 Jan 1997 11:57:26 -0500
From: "Brian J. McGovern" <mcgovern@spoon.beta.com>
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Hmm. Talk about dropping a rock on a wasps nest :) I don't think I've
gotten more email on any subject I've ever written about. At least its
good to know that its a passionate subject. However, I started
to get nervous when Terry backed me up (Sorry, Terry ;p ). I never meant
to it be negative (more of an impassioned plea for attention was my goal),
and I apologize to anyone wo got irritated.

However, this seemingly negative instance has caused several
positive things to happen. Firstly, I received  an incredible inflow
of technical information. It beat the hell out of "Read the manual section..."
that I've seen before. I learned more in the past 24 hours about
some of the more techie aspects than I have in two weeks of reading,
and another of poking around with existing code. I'd like to say that this
is the best format for _me_ to learn something, but too many have called
me the _abnormal_ case in the past.

Anyhow, my goals with this information. I'm going to sit down this weekend
and try to hammer out my first pseudo-device. Once its working, I will cut
a cookbook white paper, including ALL the steps I went through,
the sample code, and as much informative documentation as I can provide
on each of the steps. Then, I will release it for the wizards to
comment on. A final version will probably be revamped in to HTML
for inclusion in whatever document is chosen.

As hardware permits, I'll also try doing a character device driver,
and possibly a block driver (although I doubt I'll ever have
anything useful to do one with, although some samples might make sense).
Appropriate documentation on those will be released as they're completed.

My next (non question) post should be Saturday some time.
	-Brian