>>>>> "Linus" == Linus Torvalds <torvalds@transmeta.com> writes:
Linus> It is NOT true that "shared code means less bugs". People, wake
Linus> up!
Linus> It's true that "simple and tested code means less bugs". And
Linus> quite often, code sharing will imply that the code gets (a)
Linus> more complex and (b) has cases that people who make changes
Linus> will never be able to test.
Linus> No, I'm not saying that sharing is bad. Sharing is good. But
Linus> anybody who makes a blanket statement like "sharing reduces
Linus> bugs" is full of crap.
I agree with you that we should not try to share code at any price.
However, we have seen many many times that someone copies a driver,
changes a couple of lines of code such as the device detection code
and possibly the register access macros and adds him/her-self as the
author and voila we have a `new' driver.
This type of programming is bad since bug fixes to the original driver
rarely propagate to the new one. A bit of extra work to generalize the
register access macros often pays off very well in the long run.
Jes
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Wed Aug 23 2000 - 21:00:07 EST