Vote:Most Improved Kernel Module

The kernel always gets a lot of credit... but we decided to create an award for the most improved module to try to give some creds to those little components that make it all worthwhile. The nominees you selected were USB, ALSA, ReiserFS and Video4Linux. Discuss the nominees and feel free to change your vote until you have it right.

Comments

ALSA

[Anonymous Coward]

... because it is great to just compile the driver, insert the module and having sound!
Compared to this terrible OSS/Free in Linux 2.2.x ALSA is a big improvement.

Jo

Vote

[Anonymous Coward]

i vote that you pour a bowl of hot grits down your pants. thank you.

Slash 0.4

[metawronka]

Slash 0.4
by kuro5hin

For a long time now, those who want to use and improve the slashdot code have been wondering, and waiting, and hoping for the much promised 0.4 tarball. Many of them have in fact become quite irate about the lag between code releases, the lack of a CVS server, and the overall appearance that the slashdot gang doesn't practice what it preaches ("release early, release often"). How would you respond to these criticisms, and do you intend to change the development practices in any way in the future?

CmdrTaco:

I get a nice flamey email about once a week from some ass who calls me a hypocrite and slams me for not getting out a new release. My usual response is to tell them that I delay the release by 24 hours each time someone asks me when a new Slash tarball will be out.

Seriously, there are only 3 people who really know how much work a source release for this is: CowboyNeal, Patrick and Me. And the three of us have been working on a lot of stuff. As I write this, we are bugfixing and documenting and preparing for a source release. There is a private CVS server that one day soon will be publicly read only.

This isn't like other projects: it has been custom fit to our hardware and to our needs. It doesn't have install scripts or help or even comments in the code. We're just too busy to play tech support helping dozens of people compile mod_perl and tune Apache. We've decided to squash the bugs and make a clean release rather than rush it.

It's really easy for someone to complain that I didn't release a new version of the source code every week. Its also easy to forget that in the last 6 months we've doubled in traffic and we've had to optimize our code and hardware to handle that. A new source release is secondary: Our job is running Slashdot. We want to release new versions of Slash, but it is a definite second priority to keeping Slashdot moving.

Finally, it's coming soon. It'll be out when its finished. And if you ask me again I'll postpone it again.

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USB

[mozUser123]

I think having first class USB support in the kernel is particularly important particularly since many peripherals are now USB since the launch of Win98, this trend will continue with Win2K.

So thanks must go to the developers on the USB kernel modules.
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