Re: Designers and Builders (was: Who wants to maintain KR list for stable releases?)

[Al Boldi <a1426z@gawab.com>]

Adrian Bunk wrote:
> On Thu, Aug 30, 2007 at 07:31:24AM +0300, Al Boldi wrote:
> > Adrian Bunk wrote
> >
> > > Tracking feature or implementation suggestions wouldn't make sense.
> > > Consider e.g. that there are several people on linux-kernel who often
> > > write what they think the kernel should do but who never write a
> > > single line of code themselves. There's no value in tracking such
> > > stuff.
> >
> > There are designers, and there are builders.
> >
> > Can you tell me who is more important?
>
> That's a distinction that doesn't exist in practice:
>
> Designing kernel features requires good knowledge of the area of the
> kernel that should be changed.
>
> IOW: If you don't have the skills to implement it yourself you don't
> have the skills to do any good design.

I might agree with you on this wrt hacking around the kernel, but when it 
comes to introducing new subsystems, then we have a two fold situation:

  1.  Designing the internals of the new subsystem
  2.  Interfacing it with the rest of the kernel

Part 1 is completely independent of the implementation, it's part 2 that 
needs intricate implementation knowledge.

We recently had an example of this:  kexec based hibernation

So, what's wrong with tapping into people's design suggestions, and allowing 
others to implement it?


Thanks!

--
Al