Messages in this thread |  | | Date | Wed, 13 Sep 2000 18:21:12 -0700 | From | "David S. Miller" <> | Subject | Re: Proposal: Linux Kernel Patch Management System |
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Date: Wed, 13 Sep 2000 10:32:03 -0400 From: "Theodore Y. Ts'o" <tytso@MIT.EDU>
In the long run, it will make your life easier, to the extent that having an up-to-date bug list is easier, and because then I won't have to continually pester people about whether certain bugs have been fixed.
Ok, I claim:
1) I always have an uptodate bug list for the things I maintain
2) I always notify you instantly when Linus puts up a pre-patch that closes bugs in areas I maintain.
3) By going over every diff by hand I (and others) spot bugs that would not be found easily by testing. It's free code review to keep going over relative diffs like this as new pre-patches come out. (I'd say there about 10 to 20 people who, like me, religiously read over and review the diffs between pre-patches as they are released. There is _real_ value in this. It won't all stop due to the patch robot, but you for one aparently will do it less often than you do now.)
So changing the mechanism is going to make my life easier and better how?
But still, Ted, I respect you enough that if you are so convinced this is going to make things better, I'm going to give it a try as is. No problem.
However, I contend that some of us will feel that they are being punished for doing a good job thus far without this patch robot.
I don't think the big problem is VFS, MM, or networking bug tracking/fixing. The big issue really is the drivers, and it's simply because several of the maintainers of drivers are lackadasical about doing their job and chasing people down when bug reports are submitted against them.
If you agree with the previous paragraph, then my final argument is that forcing these driver "maintainers" to go through the patch robot system will not necessarily get them to look at the bug list and hunt people down to fix bugs.
Later, David S. Miller davem@redhat.com - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
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