Re: [PATCH] Updated sys_epoll now with man pages

Davide Libenzi
2002-10-29T05:15:41Z

On Mon, 28 Oct 2002, Andrew Morton wrote:

> Folks,
>
> when I took a 15-minute look at this code last week I found several
> bugs, some of which were grave. It's a terrible thing to say, but
> a sensible person would expect that a closer inspection would turn
> up more problems.
>
> Now, adding bugs to existing code is fine and traditional - people
> find them quickly and they get fixed up.
>
> But for *new* code, problems will take months to discover. The only
> practical way to get this code vetted for inclusion is a close review.
>
> And that is a sizeable task. The core implementation file is
> 1,600 lines. And I wonder how many people have counted the
> number of comments in there?
>
> Well, I'll make it easy: zero. Nil. Nada.
>
> (Well, OK, a copyright header, and something which got cut-n-pasted
> from inode.c)
>
> In my wildly unconventional opinion this alone makes epoll just a hack,
> of insufficient quality for inclusion in Linux. We *have* to stop doing
> this to ourselves!
>
>
> epoll seems to be a good and desirable thing. To move forward I
> believe we need to get this code reviewed, and documented.
>
> I can do that if you like; it will take me several weeks to get onto
> it. But until that is completed I would oppose inclusion of this
> code.

Andrew, last time you wrote me you told me that it was a matter of a
couple of hour to spend togheter to look at the code. And believe that a
couple of hours are the just about the right time. Most of the code is
_trivial_ and the "core code" can be condensed in no more than 100 lines.
I agree with you that comment are missing, but I don't think it's a
problem to add them in the "sensible" places. It'd would ahve helped if
you would have given me this feedback one week ago though ...

- Davide