Messages in this thread | | | Date | Thu, 21 Oct 1999 01:03:07 +0200 | From | Martin Dalecki <> | Subject | Re: PATCH 2.3.23 pre 2 compile fixes |
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Linus Torvalds wrote: > > On Wed, 20 Oct 1999, Gerard Roudier wrote: > > > > Just donnot backout Donald's patches that seems broken and I bet you that > > everything will be just fine, or at least not worse that other breakages > > that sometimes occur during kernel development. > > What? > > It's not about "seems broken" > > It's about the issue that there are real and definite bugs, and if a lot > of things changed there is no good way to find out exactly what change > caused the problem - especially not with the problem popping up for people > who do not necessarily know C (or the device) enough to make a informed > judgement other than "version X works for me, version Y does not".
Whey the hell do you feel responsible yorself? Let it in and forward everything to Donald. (procmail could even do it...) That's what maintainers are for.
> The whole point of open source is to expose the development, and NOT have > the mentality that "it will be fixed in the next release". There should be > many small incremental releases, because whatever Donald or others say, > especially with drivers you are often in the situation that you cannot > from looking at the source see whether something is broken or not. > > So it needs to be released often, and TESTED often. Which implies that the > test-drivers should be part of the standard development kernel, because if > they aren't, they aren't going to get very wide testing. > > For example, what has happened multiple times is that the 1% for whom some > particular old network driver does not work will try out Donalds new > drivers, and what do you know? It works for them! And people think that > that means that the new driver has to be much better than the old one, > right? > > Wrong. The new driver is NOT necessarily better at all. Not only has it > been tested by much fewer people, it has been tested by a SELF-SELECTED > group of people. Which may mean that the new driver fails horribly for a > lot of people where the old driver was fine - because the new driver > effectively has ZERO testing for common hardware that worked fine with the > old driver. > > This is not worth discussing further. Timely incremental changes are just > so OBVIOUSLY better to anybody who has done any real maintenance that the > argument is pointless. It's true in non-Linux settings too - why do you > think commercial software companies have regression tests and a large > testbed of different machines that are always active? > > If Donald doesn't do the nice incremental patches, then somebody else will > end up doing them. But that also means that Donald loses the right to then > complain about others doing the work that he somehow considers "his". > > Linus > > - > To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in > the body of a message to majordomo@vger.rutgers.edu > Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
-- Marcin Dalecki
- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.rutgers.edu Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
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