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I've occasionally worked on drivers for windows and linux. In either case, I didn't really need to read the source code; neither was it a valuable proposition.
by withinboredom 2y ago
I've occasionally worked on drivers for windows and linux. In either case, I didn't really need to read the source code; neither was it a valuable proposition. If the advertised API didn't do what it was supposed to, I likely wouldn't have understood enough to fix it: and this is my point.
Just because you can read it, doesn't mean you can or will be able to actually fix it; not because of technicality, but because of personal knowledge.
In this case, they are both black boxes.
- johnisgood 2y agoI mean, I agree, I am just saying that it is better (in general) to have the source than not having it.
- withinboredom 2y agoHow so? I once spent three days trying to figure out an issue, stepping line by line through hadoop (after figuring out the issue was in hadoop and not my own code). Yay, I proved the issue was actually in Java itself. Guess what happened next? We avoided the bug. Why? - We couldn't update Java. - We couldn't change hadoop because we were using a packaged solution. So, we just filed a bug with them. Had the source not been available, we would have just skipped all of that, and it would have been our vendor's problem 3 days earlier.