Yo:
There are several very simple reasons why it's impossible to make this forum a haven for
satisfying design discussion~~
- The members who can contribute to serious discussion on design don't want to waste their time elaborating on their design just to have it commented on by people who can't have anything useful to say about it.
- The members who have kernels worth discussing don't want to discuss their design in here, because they already have access to satisfying discussion in various IRC channels, so they don't need to air their designs here.
- The kinds of people who join the forum and make rapid progress generally very quickly become one of the above.
- The kinds of people who join the forum and ask a large number of questions and never really make any headway in a project of note tend to post the most, and as a result the majority of threads are created by or influenced significantly by these types of members.
And the result is that the forum gets very few intense discussions and instead tends to get a larger volume of un-engaging threads. This forum is very well exposed to the public: if you google almost anything about kernel development, this forum will come up in the first 2 pages of google's result set. It's a natural fly-paper for a large influx of less-experienced, ambitious developers. Members who've made more progress have mostly already moved on to small sub-groups in other places. This site is by nature, almost impossible to make friendly to serious discussion simply because the number of people who can seriously discuss any topic are few in number.
Furthermore, the structure of the forum doesn't in any way help to get targeted discussions going. There is a very generalized layout that makes it pointless to try to make a thread about a complicated design. There are no sub-forums for memory management, power management, driver interface design, high-scaling design, kernel API design, IRQ-management approaches, etc. So, you can't easily get into a topic that is really interesting to you and get hooked on the discussion there; there is the "OS Development" forum where a mash-up of topics resides, and people post all manner of nonsense there, and push better topics down. There is no reward for having created a good thread that a large number of people were edified by and that provoked some kind of highly passionate discussion, because it fades away to give place to useless nonsense fairly quickly.
If there were topic-specific sub-forums, someone could much more easily just spend a day reading through (and enjoying) the "high scaling design" sub-forum, as opposed to opening "OS Development" and seeing threads on the GDT. An arrangement like this would immediately raise the enjoyment of the forum for more experienced members, while also increasing the gravity of the threads on the forums as a whole -- a newcomer seeing no "OS Development - post any stupidness that doesn't fit anywhere else in here" forum, and being met with sub-forums with names that imply that he should understand the sub-forum's theme, would be more likely to first look-up the sub-topic, and then read some of the threads in the sub-forum before posting in that sub-forum.
Additionally, since the discussions would be more stimulating, the newcomer would be more likely to get an answer to his question without having to post at all. Even better, is the fact that people might be envouraged to create "RFC" posts that present a design, and say, link to threads with similar designs, explaining their own approach and the pros and cons, then people could comment and get down into a provocative little discussion. Naturally, aggression in such threads would be encouraged because kernel development is all about aggressive weighting of all the various aspects of a design.
Doing this would require a huge overhaul of the forums though, and a huge re-indexing effort where the mods would be required to split the forum up, and then move threads to their appropriate locations. Approximately 70% of the time spent sorting the threads would be spend moving useless topics like "GDT" and "IDT" and "how do I write a heap" and "my LAPIC code don't w0rk pls fix" into a "Useless Noise" subforum, and then you'd have to confront the issue of "what kind of sub-forum to create for boring, useless topics like
I can't get my IDT working /
My interrupts don't work?". Basically, let the atmosphere of the forum be conducive to ensuring that the forums naturally police themselves. Any structure that needs excessive policing is flawed, and needs re-thinking; I've never been a fan of top-heavy management, and I believe strongly in laissez-faire leadership with proper guidance.
--Peace out,
gravaera
17:56 < sortie> Paging is called paging because you need to draw it on pages in your notebook to succeed at it.
