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
> -
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