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This showed up on the Linux kernel developers' mailing list, during a discussion
of some new patches and the difficulties of making Linux IDE drivers work with
all the different chipsets, motherboards and devices out there.
I thought Linus' comments on docs might provoke some discussion here.
Andre is the main developer of the Linux IDE drivers. He's been arguing that the
next step is to carefully make sure they match the IDE spec. Linus is, of course,
the originator of Linux.
-------- Original Message --------
Date: Fri, 12 Jan 2001
From: Linus Torvalds
On Fri, 12 Jan 2001, Andre Hedrick wrote:
>
> It works perfectly and exactly as it is defined to work by the rules.
> Getting the rules correct == 'the concept of "working"'.
Don't be silly.
You're entirely ignoring the concept of hardware bugs. Which is one very
likely reason for this whole discussion in the first place.
ANYBODY who does driver development without taking the real world into
account is a dangerous person. Stacks of papers, diagrams and rules are
absolutely WORTHLESS if you can't just understand the fact that
documentation is nothing more than a guide-line.
Once you realize that documentation should be laughed at, peed upon, put
on fire, and just ridiculed in general, THEN, and only then, have you
reached the level where you can safely read it and try to use it to
actually implement a driver.
I'm continually amazed and absolutely scared silly by your blind trust in
paperwork, whether it be standards or committees or vendor documentation.
Linus
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