Re: PATCH 2.3.23 pre 2 compile fixes

Martin Dalecki (dalecki@cs.net.pl)
Thu, 21 Oct 1999 01:03:07 +0200


Linus Torvalds wrote:
>
> On Wed, 20 Oct 1999, Gerard Roudier wrote:
> >
> > Just donnot backout Donald's patches that seems broken and I bet you that
> > everything will be just fine, or at least not worse that other breakages
> > that sometimes occur during kernel development.
>
> What?
>
> It's not about "seems broken"
>
> It's about the issue that there are real and definite bugs, and if a lot
> of things changed there is no good way to find out exactly what change
> caused the problem - especially not with the problem popping up for people
> who do not necessarily know C (or the device) enough to make a informed
> judgement other than "version X works for me, version Y does not".

Whey the hell do you feel responsible yorself? Let it in
and forward everything to Donald. (procmail could even do it...)
That's what maintainers are for.

> The whole point of open source is to expose the development, and NOT have
> the mentality that "it will be fixed in the next release". There should be
> many small incremental releases, because whatever Donald or others say,
> especially with drivers you are often in the situation that you cannot
> from looking at the source see whether something is broken or not.
>
> So it needs to be released often, and TESTED often. Which implies that the
> test-drivers should be part of the standard development kernel, because if
> they aren't, they aren't going to get very wide testing.
>
> For example, what has happened multiple times is that the 1% for whom some
> particular old network driver does not work will try out Donalds new
> drivers, and what do you know? It works for them! And people think that
> that means that the new driver has to be much better than the old one,
> right?
>
> Wrong. The new driver is NOT necessarily better at all. Not only has it
> been tested by much fewer people, it has been tested by a SELF-SELECTED
> group of people. Which may mean that the new driver fails horribly for a
> lot of people where the old driver was fine - because the new driver
> effectively has ZERO testing for common hardware that worked fine with the
> old driver.
>
> This is not worth discussing further. Timely incremental changes are just
> so OBVIOUSLY better to anybody who has done any real maintenance that the
> argument is pointless. It's true in non-Linux settings too - why do you
> think commercial software companies have regression tests and a large
> testbed of different machines that are always active?
>
> If Donald doesn't do the nice incremental patches, then somebody else will
> end up doing them. But that also means that Donald loses the right to then
> complain about others doing the work that he somehow considers "his".
>
> Linus
>
> -
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--
	Marcin Dalecki

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