Re: Disgusted with kbuild developers

Rob Landley
2002-02-15T22:46:51Z

On Friday 15 February 2002 04:46 pm, Eric S. Raymond wrote:

> Alan, don't talk to me about "proof of concept". Tell me about a
> production-quality system, proven in use by people like Embedsys,
> Webmachines, and the Compache project. Tell me you can duplicate what
> CML2 does successfully before you run around implying my design
> assumptions are full of crap.

Eric, step back a sec. Deep breaths.

Nobody ever said CML1 had to be able to serve projects other than
linux-kernel. The fact CML2 can is nice, but irrelevant. That argument goes
nowhere.

The amount of time you've invested in your code isn't particularly
interesting to anybody but you, except as an unreliable yardstick of how long
it might take to duplicate things. The "genius from mars" technique might be
able to come up with an even better way in a week, you never know. (Even a
really hard problem space can be elegantly solved out of left field. It's
not likely, but you never know.)

The other side of the argument is that a proof of concept is not the same
thing as actually solving the problem. You have working code. Several other
people have unimplemented theoretical proposals, tests, and prototypes that
don't actually do anything useful as of yet. That's the main argument you
should probably be making.

If people want to prove Eric wrong, then make CML1 work well. If you believe
it's not as hard a problem as he says it is, then by all means prove him
wrong. Arguing about how hard the problem really would be to solve, without
actually solving it... Why?

Rob