On Thu, 13 Dec 2007, Scott Long wrote:
> This is a completely awesome demonstration of the proverbial bikeshed. I
> only wish that, someday, an important subsystem that I spend months/years
> working on will be judged by the names and prefixes that I used in it. I
> can barely wait.
An alternative viewpoint would be that, after a year of fairly catastrophic
TCP bugs resulting from a lack of adequate review and testing of TCP changes,
a lot of people are keeping a close eye on the TCP stack. Let's not
discourage that just yet. I'd like to see all significant changes to TCP
discussed on public mailing lists well before they are committed -- at that
point, someone saying "actually, I'd name the files a bit differently" is a
lot easier to deal with than, say, immediately after they are committed.
This needs to be communally owned and maintained code, or in two years time
we'll find ourselves in the same position: architectural well-meant changes
that are mostly right, but with no review of the details leading to the
inevitable failures.
Robert N M Watson
Computer Laboratory
University of Cambridge