Studying programming [was Re: readahead could use a update]

[Tony Nelson]

At 4:20 PM +0200 4/11/07, Mark wrote:
>You have no understanding at all of what the Linux kernel disk cache is
>for and how it works.  You have much studying to do.
>
>
>i know.
>i`m gonna learn that programming stuff.. but it`s hard.

Yes.  It's hard the way writing is hard.  To become a better writer one
must read many things, and then try to emulate them, and then move on to
new writings.

For your dep checker to work out, you will need to read the current code
and ferret out what it does, and then test test test with all the packages
you can find.  If it were documented, the docs would be stale and
misleadingly wrong -- and they are -- but you should still read Maximum RPM
at www.rpm.org/max-rpm.

To read the current RPM code you will need to read C, for which K&R _The C
Programming Language_ 2nd ed. is still probably best, and for yum, Python,
for which the Python Tutorial at docs.python.org/tut/ is the best way to
start .

To find out how the kernel disk cache works, well, there is the source, and
LKML, and for some things the user-oriented fedora-list, which can be
browsed easily enough at www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-list, or searched
with Google:

    search terms site:www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-list

(I use "site:" a lot to narrow searches to a particular source.  It's very
flexible about what it accepts, so "site:redhat.com" would find the same
things as well as many others.)

Ehh, while I'm on the soapbox, man and apropos are your friends (see man
man and man apropos).  Well, apropos is not quite your friend, since if it
is given two words it returns separate results for each, rather than one
result for both, but I have a nicer one at
<http://georgeanelson.com/apropos2.htm/>.  Apropos2 could use the ability
to subtract things, but currently I use grep:

    apropos foo bar | grep -v bart

or more practically:

    apropos module | grep -v '(3'
-- 
____________________________________________________________________
TonyN.:'                       <mailto:tonynelson at georgeanelson.com>
      '                              <http://www.georgeanelson.com/>
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