Re: Disgusted with kbuild developers

Eric S. Raymond
2002-02-15T21:06:40Z

Larry McVoy <lm@bitmover.com>:
> Gimme a break. I read those posts, I repeatedly saw that people said to do
> that, I don't remember if it was Linus or not, but it's not like he has the
> only brain. The clearly expressed sentiment was to put the help next to the
> source. You repeatedly came up with corner cases where that wouldn't work
> and used that as an excuse to do nothing.

And one of those corner cases in fact came around and bit us on the ass.

If we had handled the transition the smooth way I wanted to, and was
prepared to, we'd still have a maintainable help database spanning 2.4
as well as 2.5. As it is, Linus blew my system into flinders and
obsoleted all my tools (I'm not talking CML2 itself now but the machinery I
wrote for tracking help changes).

As a result, I had to tell Marcelo I had no choice but to drop maintaining
the 2.4 help file. The divergence, and the damage, is probably not
recoverable.
--
Eric S. Raymond