>>
>> Profit motive, not OCD, I assure you ;-).
> Second that. Especially because kernel documentation is nonexistent,
> the source is necessary for driver development. (Although I've long
> wondered whether making the source available was just an excuse to
> avoid providing adequate kernel documentation.)
I'll third it :).
I had no way of figuring out why some sysctl calls weren't working until I
saw the code returning ENOTSUP, and the conditions that it returned that
value. The man pages certainly said they should work...
Bill
-----Original Message-----
From: darwin-dev-bounces+billl=email@hidden
[mailto:darwin-dev-bounces+billl=email@hidden] On Behalf Of
Chris Thomas
Sent: Thursday, February 23, 2006 9:42 PM
To: email@hidden
Subject: Re: usefulness of source
On Feb 23, 2006, at 10:38 AM, Amanda Walker wrote:
> On Feb 22, 2006, at 9:01 PM, Rob Braun wrote:
>> Do people actually do anything with the
>> source, or just have an obsessive compulsive disorder to
>> continually check for it?
>
> On several occasions, access to the source (including xnu, which
> I'm hoping will show up) has been the only way I've been able to
> track down the info I've needed to rev hardware device drivers for
> new versions of MacOS X.
>
> Profit motive, not OCD, I assure you ;-).
Second that. Especially because kernel documentation is nonexistent,
the source is necessary for driver development. (Although I've long
wondered whether making the source available was just an excuse to
avoid providing adequate kernel documentation.)
Also, to add to Dave Leimbach's point:
> Point is, we more technically savvy geeks even had *fun* with this
> stuff when it was more enabled. Now the only project we've got
> that's even close to like this anymore is Webkit, and I suspect
> that's because Apple really does need to get along with the KDE
> hackers for this to continue. Perhaps it's more of a political
> strength or a goodwill thing because they've chosen to work closely
> with that community (and have received bad press in the past about
> it too).
Apple could've ignored the complaints of the KDE hackers and
proceeded along their own solitary path, much as they did with the
kernel. But they chose differently, and they're reaping the rewards:
> We've received contributions in every area of WebKit. Here are just
> a few of the improvements made by non-Apple contributors:
>
> The entire webkit.org infrastructure, including nightly builds and
> the buildbot.
> JavaScriptCore that matches up with KJS.
> Many fixes that were formerly only in KHTML and KJS in the KDE
> source tree.
> SVG support in WebKit.
> Improved structure of DOM and auto-generated bindings inspired by
> KDOM.
> Vast text layout and rendering improvements, including excellent
> right-to-left support.
> A tremendous number of bug fixes that were easy because of
> reductions, excellent test cases, and pinpointed version numbers
> for regressions.
Chris
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