Re: [PATCH locking/atomic 18/19] locking/atomic: Refrain from generating duplicate fallback kernel-doc

[Peter Zijlstra <peterz@infradead.org>]

On Thu, May 11, 2023 at 01:25:18PM -0700, Paul E. McKenney wrote:
> On Thu, May 11, 2023 at 10:01:42PM +0200, Peter Zijlstra wrote:
> > On Thu, May 11, 2023 at 12:53:46PM -0700, Paul E. McKenney wrote:
> > > Do you have an alternative suggestion for generating the kernel-doc?
> > > The current lack of it is problematic.
> > 
> > I've never found a lack of kernel-doc to be a problem. And I'm very much
> > against complicating the scripts to add it.
> 
> I am sure that you have not recently found the lack of kernel-doc for
> the atomic operations to be a problem, given that you wrote many of
> these functions.

Sure; but I meant in general -- I've *never* used kernel-doc. Comments I
occasionally read, and sometimes they're not even broken either, but
kernel-doc, nope.

> OK, you mentioned concerns about documentation people nitpicking.  This
> can be dealt with.  The added scripting is not that large or complex.
> 
> > Also, there's Documentation/atomic_t.txt
> 
> Yes, if you very carefully read that document end to end, correctly
> interpreting it all, you will know what you need to.  Of course, first
> you have to find it.  And then you must avoid any lapses while reading
> it while under pressure.  Not particularly friendly to someone trying
> to chase a bug.

It's either brief and terse or tediously long -- I vastly prefer the
former, my brain can much better parse structure than English prose.

Also, I find, pressure is never conductive to anything, except prehaps
cooking rice and steam trains (because nothing is as delicous as a
pressure cooked train -- oh wait).

Add enough pressure and the human brain reduces to driven and can't read
even the most coherent of text no matter how easy to find.

In such situations it's for the manager to take the pressure away and
the engineer to think in relative peace.