Re: [RFC] HOWTO do Linux kernel development - take 2

Greg KH
2005-11-16T06:04:01Z

On Wed, Nov 16, 2005 at 03:17:54AM +0100, Adrian Bunk wrote:
> On Tue, Nov 15, 2005 at 05:10:32PM -0800, Greg KH wrote:
> > On Wed, Nov 16, 2005 at 01:23:48AM +0100, Adrian Bunk wrote:
> >...
> > > LDD (as you might have heard, it's also available online for free ;-) )
> > > and the book by Robert Love are good starting points for learning kernel
> > > programming, and they should IMHO be listed here.
> >
> > But that's what the Documentation/kernel-docs.txt file has in it. I
>
> It seems you haven't looked at kernel-docs.txt before saying this...
>
> kernel-docs.txt is so heavily outdated we should better remove it.

No, we should clean it up and update it. I think that Randy is
currently working on this.

> > don't want to get into judging which kernel books go into this file, as
> > people might think I am a bit biased :)
>
> Judging from the questions I see from newbies on linux-kernel (who
> should be the target audience of your document), you are omitting the
> answer to the most frequently asked question.
>
> I'd say noone disagrees that LDD and the book by Robert Love are the
> books mentioned most often (and by different kernel developers) when
> people ask which book to read as introduction for kernel hacking.

This document is to help describe the non-technical things about Linux
kernel development. The things that are not doucumented well, the
process and procedures that we go through to create this kernel.

The technical things are covered very well, by lots of other documents,
magazines, sites, and books. We should list those in the
kernel-docs.txt file.

> > > > Becoming A Kernel Developer
> > > > ---------------------------
> > > >...
> > > > If you already have a chunk of code that you want to put into the kernel
> > > > tree, but need some help getting it in the proper form, the
> > > > kernel-mentors project was created to help you out with this. It is a
> > > > mailing list, and can be found at:
> > > > http://selenic.com/mailman/listinfo/kernel-mentors
> > >
> > >
> > > This list seems to be nearly dead, and it seems the following one is now
> > > used instead:
> > > http://mail.nl.linux.org/kernelnewbies/
> >
> > I do mention the kernelnewbies project, which includes the mailing list.
> > I hope the mentor's project picks up, I just think not enough people
> > realize it is there.
> >...
>
> It's perhaps a bit out of the scope of this discussion, but do we really
> need both of these lists? I don't see any real difference between them.

It is out of the scope of this discussion :)

thanks,

greg k-h