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Inside the OpenSolaris Source Code

Posted by Zonk on from the looking-at-guts dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Ten million lines of code and not a single profanity? Is that really possible? Apparently, yes, says OpenSolaris community manager Jim Grisanzio. He said even before Sun filtered the code, it was relatively free of profanity. 'They went through the code for a great many things,' he said, 'and I'm sure they cleaned a word or two. Or three.' But a careful look through the code will reveal some programmers' frustration." From the article: "The most embarassing comment came from a developer of the GRUB project who went only by the name of 'Gord'. 'This function is truly horrid,' he wrote. 'We try opening the device, then severely abuse the GEOMETRY->flags field to pass a file descriptor to biosdisk. Thank God nobody's looking at this comment, or my reputation would be ruined.'"

6 of 338 comments (clear)

  1. Grub is a bootloader by Dancin_Santa · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Hardly part of the actual OS.

    Sounds like Sun did a bang-up job with their software, reining in the developers under pretty solid coding guidlines. It's the Open Source people who have gone off and sullied the code with their silliness.

    Humor in comments is sometimes good. Just not on Slashdot where it only risks your karma.

  2. Nice humour by moz25 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I like the guy's humour. Either that or he is not smart for putting a reputation-ruining 'bomb' in the source code :-) But anyway... good programmers are supposed to be very critical of their code so even functionally correct code can be commented as though it were horrible.

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  3. 10kHz in 1996 by arete · · Score: 4, Insightful

    ZDnet seems to want us to think "clock speeds" are at 3 Ghz regarding the following quote:

    'Another tried his hand at predicting the future of system speeds. "As of this writing (1996) a clock rate of more than about 10 kHz seems utterly ridiculous, although this observation will no doubt seem quaintly amusing one day," he wrote.'

    But in 1996 you had roughly 100Mhz 486s and Pentiums, so clearly it's not that clock, it's some other clock.

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  4. Has anyone found ... by ratta · · Score: 5, Insightful

    something really interesting in the code, now that Solaris is open? People has been saying "Sun will never open Solaris" for month, now that it is open all that they do is to grep "fuck" or "shit", or look for frustrated comments?

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    1. Re:Has anyone found ... by Myopic · · Score: 3, Insightful

      kudos. you just outgeeked a lot of us.

  5. Source browser in the wrong hands by ahl_at_sun · · Score: 3, Insightful
    This article has all the sophistication of a 5-year old looking up 'anus' in the OED. Someone already pointed out the confusion between the processor clock and the system clock -- a confusion that would have been avoided if the author had read the code or even the rest of the comments.

    More ludicrous is the author's supposed identification of a Mark Felt lurking in the shadows of the DTrace code:
    The much-vaunted dynamic tracing (dtrace) feature of Sun's system may not be as safe to use as most people think.
    That's based on what? The two ASSERTs that follow the cited comment? This one doesn't go all the way to the top...