DougIngraham
Veteran Member
I thought we did a pretty good job of allowing the "new" serial disk server be compatible with the old handlers. Because of the way we did it the old boot still works.My main unspoken concerns were really about the migration path, as there are a bunch of existing SerialDisk implementations, not all of which will get properly re-worked with the latest code. I feared that the next bootloader/server would not be "upward compatible" in the sense that the new server could be used with the older drivers and bootloaders.
There is some of that in the OCD thing I suppose. It is kind of obvious when looking at DEC power supplies that they probably put the new guy on them and then suffered with power supply issues for years.Wrt your OCD, I think of it as an "EE" thing. Unlike "proper engineering", my background is software, where the assumption is that "anything useable today is far better than something better tomorrow, let alone something perfect next year". There are pros and cons to each approach.
The standards for engineering are different. When a bridge or a building falls down, that's (rightly) a scandal. In software a "self driving feature" that kills a few riders is somehow par for the course.
There's something hard and cynical in there about how easy it is to blame the users for believing the hype, too. But that's all way off subject.
With software there used to be quality assurance departments who had final say on product ship. The big company I did some software work with was Wang Labs and if QA didn't sign off on it then it didn't ship. QA was a constant issue for the programmers there. After the internet and easy software updates those QA departments seem to have lost their power because we can ship it now and easily fix it later. My problem with this is that they never seem to get around to fixing it. Serious problems sure, they get attention but little things almost never. My Tesla Model S is 9 years old this month and there are still software bugs that have been there the whole time. The one that annoys me almost every day is the charge port release. You press the button to release the cable lock. The lock releases and then a tenth of a second later it relocks. You press the release button again and it unlocks and stays unlocked. This should be an easy fix. I suspect that in Tesla's case Elon is the QA department and if he doesn't notice it then nobody works on it. End of off topic rant.
I think I will post all the boot pieces after I have tested them. Now back to work!