itsy bitsy Unix

[Eric Smith]

Paul wrote:
> all too often, priorities
> are used to hide the fact that the builder didn't analyze the job
> sufficiently, and simply hacked the priorities until things seemed to
> work in test.

True.  You wouldn't believe how many times I've seen other engineers
trying to set the priority of their task higher than those of other
tasks just because they have some vague idea that their task is
"important", rather than any understanding of actual relationships between
the tasks.

A good rule of thumb is that in the absence of a rational basis for
one task having a higher priority than another, all tasks should have
the same priority.  Far too often a person's intuitive idea of what
the relative task priorities should be is wrong.

Eric