Re: This is [Re:] How to improve the quality of the kernel[?].

[Linus Torvalds]

On Tue, 19 Jun 2007, Oleg Verych wrote:
> 
> I'm proposing kind of smart tracking, summarized before. I'm not an
> idealist, doing manual work. Making tools -- is what i've picked up from
> one of your mails. Thus hope of having more opinions on that.

Don't get me wrong, I wasn't actually responing to you personally, I was 
actually responding mostly to the tone of this thread.

So I was responding to things like the example from Bartlomiej about 
missed opportunity for taking developer review into account (and btw, I 
think a little public shaming might not be a bad idea - I believe more in 
*social* rules than in *technical* rules), and I'm responding to some of 
the commentary by Adrian and others about "no regressions *ever*".

These are things we can *wish* for. But the fact that we migth wish for 
them doesn't actually mean that they are really good ideas to aim for in 
practice. 

Let me put it another way: a few weeks ago there was this big news story 
in the New York Times about how "forgetting" is a very essential part 
about remembering, and people passed this around as if it was a big 
revelation. People think that people with good memories have a "good 
thing".

And personally, I was like "Duh". 

Good memory is not about remembering everything. Good memory is about 
forgetting the irrelevant, so that the important stuff stands out and you 
*can* remember it. But the big deal is that yes, you have to forget stuff, 
and that means that you *will* miss details - but you'll hopefully miss 
the stuff you don't care for. The keyword being "hopefully". It works most 
of the time, but we all know we've sometimes been able to forget a detail 
that turned out to be crucial after all.

So the *stupid* response to that is "we should remember everything". It 
misses the point. Yes, we sometimes forget even important details, but 
it's *so* important to forget details, that the fact that our brains 
occasionally forget things we later ended up needing is still *much* 
preferable to trying to remember everything.

The same tends to be true of bug hunting, and regression tracking. 

There's a lot of "noise" there. We'll never get perfect, and I'll argue 
that if we don't have a system that tries to actively *remove* noise, 
we'll just be overwhelmed. But that _inevitably_ means that sometimes 
there was actually a signal in the noise that we ended up removing, 
because nobody saw it as anything but noise. 

So I think people should concentrate on turning "noise" into "clear 
signal", but at the same time remember that that inevitably is a "lossy" 
transformation, and just accept the fact that it will mean that we 
occasionally make "mistakes". 

This is why I've been advocating bugzilla "forget" stuff, for example. I 
tend to see bugzilla as a place where noise accumulates, rather than a 
place where noise is made into a signal. 

Which gets my to the real issue I have: the notion of having a process for 
_tracking_ all the information is actually totally counter-productive, if 
a big part of the process isn't also about throwing noise away.

We don't want to "save" all the crud. I don't want "smart tracking" to 
keep track of everything. I want "smart forgetting", so that we are only 
left with the major signal - the stuff that matters. 

		Linus
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