Bad Linux Programmers 3751

Captain Dondo

True. And I should preface this by saying that I have little sympathy with the OP on just about anything he says, but this is one place where I can at least understand his gripe, though it's definitely not confined to Linux: all programmers sometimes tend to forget that when all is said and done, there are other human beings involved.

At least with Linux you CAN go back to the source, but often that's inconvenient, or less than illuminating: to understand a particular driver, you may need to know a lot about both Linux internals and the particular hardware the driver is for. Therefor, I agree that programmers should try to give intelligible error messages. I'll immediately follow that with a big WHEN POSSIBLE because it's also true that in many cases, if the programmer had any real clue as to how his code could have gotten to where it is at that moment, he-she would have programmed around the problem and you never would have gotten there. A lot of errors really are very unexpected conditions, and it's anybody's guess what the root cause was without anything else to go on. So the programmer sometimes can't do much more than spit out the return the kernel gave it and hope you have some idea why.

-- Tony Lawrence