Allowing too many trivial threads has exactly the same effect, of limiting the appeal of the forums, just in a different direction. I guess it's a question of whether the site is aimed at experienced programmers, who are prepared to do research but need some resources to help them with OS development, or beginners who don't understand the way that strings work in C and can't be bothered to read the Intel manuals to determine how the stack behaves with different sized operands (and different processor modes).

I may have misjudged the aims of this web site.

This thread has been too controversial, and I don't know if the moderators moderate the forum, they'll close it.

Those beginners you're complaining about? ...rather than telling them to go away and read a 3500 page manual .....
Brendan

10. The Platform: You should have studied the manuals for the processor you will be programming for. They contain the information you need to design your kernel in the first place. Asking for information that can easily be obtained from these documents will only give cause to "Read The (...) Manual" responses, or simply RTFM.

Clearly one page that needs an overhaul is "Required Knowledge"RTFRK

Just my todays' two cents. I do coincide with Brendan in that "sending newcomers to read 3500-pages long Intel's manuals" is just silly. If you see my previous post, you'll see I go the other way around.

Asking for information that can easily be obtained from these documents will only give cause to "Read The (...) Manual" responses, or simply RTFM

Why? In the case in point (how many bytes does "PUSH" put on the stack) this is a simple, direct question of fact that is dealt with in two or three pages of the definitive reference to the processor. It's not a question of referring (what should, according to the stated forum rules, be knowledgeable amateurs who are prepared to do research for themselves) beginners to a 3500 page document. Referring people to those manuals is exactly the correct response and is far more productive then baby-sitting as it encourages them to research for themselves and learn not to just use others as a crutch at the first sign of difficulty.

Having read this thread, and the stickies at the head of the forums, together with the "Required Knowledge" article it appears that not only am I mistaken as to the aims of this site, but so also are those who wrote those documents. It is ironic that the author of the thread describing what is required of posters now berates me for behaving according to that post and referenced articles.

If the aim of the site is indeed to babysit newcomers; to teach by rote rather than to educate in the true sense of the word (education to my mind is a matter of leading people to knowledge rather than just doling facts out) then that's fine. But that's not the site that it professes to be. So, first things first. Let's make it clear exactly what the site is for, and what it expects of users, and provide a consistent approach. Let's not tell people in the Required Knowledge that they should "read the manual" and then berate users for suggesting that people should "read the manual".

What I meant is exactly what Brendan posted earlier, i.e., you shall provide them with some sort of advice, some way or another, not "go to intel.com and read that full manual!"

Don't exaggerate and/or misquote me. I never suggested that anyone should read the full manual; just that they should read the relevant 3 or 4 pages describing the "PUSH" instruction. You spoon-feed people all you like, but when the best answer is "read the manual" (and that is almost always the best answer to a direct question about a particular assembler instruction - how many operands does it take?, what addressing modes does it support?, what's its opcode?, how does it affect the flags?, how does it affect the stack?) then that's the best answer to give, IMO. We shouldn't clutter the forums up by repeating what is already in the reference documentation; and we shouldn't have to waste our time instructing people how to compare strings in C.

If you want to turn the site into "A beginner's course in assembler" or "A beginner's course in C" then go ahead. But that's not for me; there are plenty of sites that already do that far better than this one ever can.

I'm clearly in a minority of one, but my thoughts are that if someone is not prepared to read the documentation to discover the answer to questions that have a clearly defined answer (as already described), even when it is suggested that this is where the information lies, then they are extremely unlikely to progress further with OS development.

I'd like this to be a site where serious discussion of OS development takes place, not answers to queries such as "Why doesn't 'if (string == "Hello World")' do what. i want it to?" But if others want to clutter the forums up with that sort of trivia, so be it.