Messages in this thread | | | Date | Thu, 01 May 2008 14:32:35 -0400 | From | Stephen Clark <> | Subject | Re: Slow DOWN, please!!! |
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Nigel Cunningham wrote: > Hi. > > On Wed, 2008-04-30 at 18:40 -0700, Linus Torvalds wrote: >> The thing is, the quality of individual patches isn't what matters! What >> matters is the quality of the end result. And people are going to be a lot >> more involved in looking at, testing, and working with code that is >> merged, rather than code that isn't. > > No. People generally expect that code that has been merged does work, so > they don't look at it unless they're forced to (by a bug or the desire > to make further modifications in that code) and they don't explicitly > seek to test it. They just seek to use it. > > When it doesn't work, some of us will go and seek to find the cause, > others (most?) will simply roll back to whatever they last found to be > reliable. > > Out of tree code has the same issues. > > The only time code really gets looked at and tested is when there's a > problem, or when people are explicitly choosing to inspect it (pre-merge > reviews, eg). > > So my answer to the "how do we raise quality" question would be that > when writing the code, we put time and effort into properly analysing > the problem and developing a solution, we put time and effort into > carefully testing the solution, and we put code in that will help the > end-user help us to debug issues later (without them necessarily needing > to git-bisect). After all, good software isn't the result of random (or > semi-random), unconsidered modifications, but of planning, thought and > attention to detail. > > In other words, I'm arguing that the speed of merging should be > irrelevant. What's relevant is the quality of the work done in the first > place. > > If you want better quality code, penalise the people who get buggy code > merged. Give them a reason to get it in a better state before they try > to merge. Of course Linus alone can't do that. > > Nigel > > -- > 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/ > Amen!
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