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Subject: Re: Random numbers et al

Re: Random numbers et al

From: Daniel Stenberg <daniel_at_haxx.se>
Date: Tue, 8 Apr 2003 14:47:59 +0200 (CEST)

On Tue, 8 Apr 2003, Blue Chip wrote:

> My hope had been to offer something to Rockbox community.

We appreciate anything and everything you can offer, really. But we also
offer you our opinions about where we need help and what we don't think we
need help with.

I'm saying We here but I speak for myself, however I think I have a grasp of
how a bunch of the other guys feel about this too.

> There are zero docs on how the firmware works or how it "hangs together"
> (its basic structure) and code comments are almost unheard of. So I am
> struggling to work out what is going on. This is *NOT* intended as a
> criticism, it is merely an honest observation.

That is a correct observation. So maybe you could help us out to document
things as you proceed and find out?

This fact has, believe it or not, not been so an important factor for the ~50
persons that have provided non-trivial source code contributions so far.

> My _job_ is writing mega-optimised code for PC BIOSes and other relevant
> embedded chips for "critical systems" and hence this is probably my
> speciality - I thought that I would offer you the benefit of my skills. I
> am _genuinely_ surprised at how much resistance I have come across!

Björn, I and Linus (and most likely a bunch of the other contributors too)
all work with embedded programming in our day-life jobs and have done so for
10+ years. We know this stuff too.

I think in general we appreciate help with the areas we believe we have
problems with or where we still lack features (reading the feature requests,
they are plenty). We don't have a performance problem (AFAIK) so rewriting
stuff to assembler is _very_ low prio, and in most cases simply counter
productive.

> My recent hobby-work was writing decompiler and silicon level simulator for
> a series of MIPS based dvd players. You can imagine how I felt when it was
> suggested that my skills would be best applied to "making the cursor flash"
> (see IRC logs.)

Seriously, I can't. Why are you different or better than everyone else?

I guess that was a suggestion (haven't checked the log), and you're free to
pick a task yourself. I don't understand how writing stuff we don't need are
the only things you seem to be able to do.

> I have *NOT* "complained" about your rand(), what I said was nothing more
> than MY opinon based on MY experience and observations of the code - I was
> offering you an alternative which I honestly thought would benefit the
> Rockbox effort - but again, I have only succeeded in offending :(

... and I expressed that if replacing the current one with yours is a
significant improvement, then I'm all for it. Much of the development of
Rockbox is making patches (and often separate binaries) available, so that
people can try out new concepts or new code before it goes into the main
sources. You can do that too.

I don't want to be rude, to offend you or to be annoying. I'm trying to
express that I'm sure we all can cooperate fine. We just need to be allowed
to argue about the priorities. We are many with opinions here.

-- 
 Daniel Stenberg -- http://rockbox.haxx.se/ -- http://daniel.haxx.se/
Received on 2003-04-08

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