Messages in this thread | | | Date | Tue, 25 Jul 2006 23:20:01 +0200 | From | Matthias Andree <> | Subject | Re: automated test? (was Re: Linux 2.6.17.7) |
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On Tue, 25 Jul 2006, Arjan van de Ven wrote:
> well you can do such a thing withing statistical bounds; however... if > the patch already is in -git (as is -stable policy normally).. it should > have been found there already...
The sad facts I learned from Debian bug #212762 (not kernel related) that culminated in CVE-2005-2335 (remote root exploit against older fetchmail) and from various qmail bugs Guninski discovered:
- a bug need not necessarily be found soon after introduction
- a bug report may not convey the hint "look at this NOW, the shit already hit the fan" (sorry, I meant to write: look NOW, it's urgent and important)
- an automated test to catch non-trivial mistakes is non-trivial in itself, and - what I've seen with another project I was involved with, and more often than I found amusing - is that the test itself can be buggy causing bogus results.
That doesn't mean I object to automated tests, but "it should have been found by now" (because the source is open, someone could have tested it, whatever) just doesn't work.
-- Matthias Andree - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
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