Re: Building 100 kernels; we suck at dependencies and drown in warnings

[Jesper Juhl]

On 2/26/06, Sam Ravnborg <sam@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On Sun, Feb 26, 2006 at 05:21:17PM +0100, Jesper Juhl wrote:
> >
> > Hi everyone,
> >
> > I just sat down and build 100 kernels (2.6.16-rc4-mm2 kernels to be exact)
> >
> >       95 kernels were build with 'make randconfig'.
> >       1 kernel was build with the config I normally use for my own box.
> >       1 kernel was build from 'make defconfig'.
> >       1 kernel was build from 'make allmodconfig'.
> >       1 kernel was build from 'make allnoconfig'.
> >       1 kernel was build from 'make allyesconfig'.
> >
> > That was an interresting experience.
> >
> > First of all not very many of the kernels actually build correctly and
> > secondly, if I grep the build logs for warnings I'm swamped.
> >
> > Out of 100 kernels 82 failed to build - that's an 18% success rate people,
> > not very impressive.
> I would recommed to fix the obvious cases and leave it.
> Better to concentrate on 'normal' configs. This includes
> allmodconfig/allyesconfig/defconfig but it certainly does not include a
> bunch of random configs. Real peoples config is much better for this.
>
Thank you for your input.

I agree that "common configs" are the most important ones, but I also
feel that problems need to be fixed in general no matter how "corner
case" or "trivial" or "uncommon" they may be.

I ran an experiment, I reported the results. And from the comments in
this thread and what I've also recieved privately I think I achieved
my goal of getting more bugs fixed :)
I personally fixed some of the warnings.
Other people fixed other warnings and errors as a result of my post.
People got thinking about these things.

All in all I think that's a good result :-)


--
Jesper Juhl <jesper.juhl@xxxxxxxxx>
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