Rebel Code by Moody Glyn

Author:Moody, Glyn
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 2011-08-17T16:00:00+00:00

That is, he wanted to know why a small piece of code didn’t work in version 123 of the 2.1 development kernel. As is usual, somebody soon came along with an explanation for the problem, and attached a patch that would sort things out.

But then another hacker, Geert Uytterhoeven, stepped in and saidPlease don’t waste your time on creating these patches. These things are functional in the “vger” tree.

“Vger” has entered into Linux mythology, and refers to a computer located at Rutgers University that ran the Linux-kernel mailing list, among others. It was set up by Dave Miller when he was studying and working there. Miller explains how this came about. “The [mailing] lists which existed when I showed up were run in Finland,” he recalls, “and were starting to reach a state of being unmaintained. People began to complain, the lists worked only every other day, you couldn’t get responses to help unsubscribe when one had problems, etc.

“So I asked my co-workers [at Rutgers], ‘Can I run a few small mailing lists here on this old machine that doesn’t get used much?’ The response was something like, ‘Test one, and if no problems show up you can add the others.’ I think they all were moved over to Rutgers within the next two weeks or so,” Miller continues. “The machine’s name at Rutgers has always been vger. Vger sounds like a funny name, doesn’t it? Remember Star Trek, where the spaceship named ‘Voyager’ flies past the screen, and some of its letters had been scuffed off? The remaining letters spelled out VGER. Hey, I’m not a Trekkie and I hadn’t named this machine, but it’s an interesting Linux history tidbit, I suppose.”

Vger was also used for running a program called Concurrent Versions System (CVS). This is special software that is used to manage software development; essentially, it allows people to keep track of the current state of a project, for example, which patches have been applied. It is widely used, and is a boon for keeping on top of a complex and fast-moving project such as Linux. Uytterhoeven’s message that things were “functional in the vger tree” meant simply that the patches had been applied to the code in the CVS system on the vger machine. There was only one problem: Linus did not use CVS on vger.

As a result, when replying to the previous message about not wasting time creating new patches, Linus wrote:He’s not wasting time.

I have stopped synching up to vger a _long_ time ago. Anybody who still thinks vger has _any_ relevance to the standard kernel is very much misguided.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.