From: David Brownell <david-b@pacbell.net> Date: Mon, 02 Jun 2003 18:56:23 -0700 Well, the difference between code and its spec is generally a bug that needs to be fixed ... See, a document is NOT the spec, the code is the spec. Because where the document is wrong, the code determines the final answer. This is true in all cases. I cannot tell you how much time I've seen people waste because they went for documents first, only to find them to be inaccurate for some corner case whilst the code has all of the accurate answers. When I see someone want docs, I interpret this as "I don't want to have to think or have to comprehend something, I'm too lazy to read the code." Well, such laziness leads the person in question only to be suscpetible to all of the inaccuracies and disconnect that always will exist between said docs (if they even exist) and the code. It is also the mechanism that leads people to send patches that add arbitrary crap all over the ipv4/ipv6 code, totally missing the point that the routing and/or netlink layer did %99 of what they wanted already. For example, I added a hoplimit route attribute to RTNETLINK. Who documented this? What document can you read that would teach you about this feature? None. And don't tell me this is a doc bug, every time I make a change the documentation will be instantly buggy and I'm not going to be required to document every diff I make to the tree. - : send the line "unsubscribe linux-net" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
