Linus, I have to tip my hat to you sir. As much as I wanted to believe and tried to make it happen ... ATA/IDE was forced to design many exception case events. Regardless how hard I an others tried to invoke/create a driver to mimic the "SPEC", the hardware people broke most of the rules and each chipset was littered with exception cases. It has been 7 years since you and I started butting heads, and in the end both of us were right. A driver could be written to follow the standard exactly, and it would never work (alone, as-is) because the hardware was not paying attention the rules book. Hope you can kick back and laugh about the history, too! Have a great Day! Andre Hedrick LAD Storage Consulting Group On Thu, 29 Sep 2005, Linus Torvalds wrote: > > > On Thu, 29 Sep 2005, Arjan van de Ven wrote: > > > > a spec describes how the hw works... how we do the sw piece is up to > > us ;) > > How we do the SW is indeed up to us, but I want to step in on your first > point. > > Again. > > A "spec" is close to useless. I have _never_ seen a spec that was both big > enough to be useful _and_ accurate. > > And I have seen _lots_ of total crap work that was based on specs. It's > _the_ single worst way to write software, because it by definition means > that the software was written to match theory, not reality. > > So there's two MAJOR reasons to avoid specs: > > - they're dangerously wrong. Reality is different, and anybody who thinks > specs matter over reality should get out of kernel programming NOW. > When reality and specs clash, the spec has zero meaning. Zilch. Nada. > None. > > It's like real science: if you have a theory that doesn't match > experiments, it doesn't matter _how_ much you like that theory. It's > wrong. You can use it as an approximation, but you MUST keep in mind > that it's an approximation. > > - specs have an inevitably tendency to try to introduce abstractions > levels and wording and documentation policies that make sense for a > written spec. Trying to implement actual code off the spec leads to the > code looking and working like CRAP. > > The classic example of this is the OSI network model protocols. Classic > spec-design, which had absolutely _zero_ relevance for the real world. > We still talk about the seven layers model, because it's a convenient > model for _discussion_, but that has absolutely zero to do with any > real-life software engineering. In other words, it's a way to _talk_ > about things, not to implement them. > > And that's important. Specs are a basis for _talking_about_ things. But > they are _not_ a basis for implementing software. > > So please don't bother talking about specs. Real standards grow up > _despite_ specs, not thanks to them. > > Linus > - > : send the line "unsubscribe linux-scsi" in > the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx > More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html > - : send the line "unsubscribe linux-scsi" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
