Absolutely. I understand why they do it (I used to work there years ago). But that's also a knee-jerk excuse used by teams so that they don't have to deal with documenting something.
Their POV is understandable (if not wholly justified IMO), but then so is my irritation at the practice :)
You act as if they're alone in this. I just watched a livestream from the OpenZFS summit yesterday and they're having trouble with stable pages in Linux because there's almost 0 documentation. So is that "typical linux"? Are they trying to intentionally make life difficult for people that aren't in the internal kernel clique? Linus himself gave a completely uneducated rant against ZFS a while back, so should we assume ill intentions?
>Where did I mention anything about any other OS practice, or "typical Linux" ?
whoosh. You said it was typical Microsoft to not document APIs and implied this is an MS problem. I gave you a direct example IN LINUX and asked you if that's "typical linux"? Because you seem to be saying that the problem is isolated to MS.
>Every time I hear someone say "Microsoft has changed", I mutter to myself "nope, same old MSFT with better PR".
That isn't "mild criticism about an obscure API" and painting it as such is just farcical.
Read Pirates of Silicon Valley. There's a history of Microsoft doing really really shady unforgivable stuff. No matter how much they've changed, the history's there.
I've read Pirates of Silicon Valley, I know exactly what MS's history is. I also know it was a completely different set of leadership and I don't judge current leadership by their predecessors actions anymore than I judge a person I've just met by who their parents are.
Nothing that OP complained about points even a little bit to the tactics used by Ballmer and Gates, it points to: this is a new feature with unstable APIs so it's not fully documented yet.
