Re: quality control

[Jens Axboe <axboe@suse.de>]

On Tue, Feb 07 2006, Andrew Morton wrote:
> Jens Axboe <axboe@suse.de> wrote:
> >
> > Look, it's really simple: lets say I make a change that has to do with
> > PM, you do a quick compile test with and _without_ PM just to check you
> > didn't screw anything up with that change. You change reiserfs acl
> > stuff, you do a quick compile test with and without that configured.
> > 
> > It's a pretty standard procedure, and contrary to what you think, it
> > _is_ required before submitting a patch. No one is asking anyone to
> > check all possible configure options, but the interesting data set is
> > typically extremely easy to guess looking at a change.
> 
> <rofl>
> 
> bix:/usr/src/op> find patches -name '*build-fix*' | wc -l
>     533
> 
> bix:/usr/src/op> find patches -name '*fix.patch' | wc -l
>    5109
> 
> A lot of people don't make the slightest effort.  But it's not a big
> problem, really.  Silly build errors are reported early and are almost
> always trivial to fix.  The major drawback is that they can wreck a -mm
> release for many testers.

That's precisely the problem, it may be really simple to fix but often
will stop people from testing.

Your fix count probably isn't totally accurate either, I bet a lot of
these are fixups due to conflicts with other patches. I'm talking about
the fact that someone sends Linus a patch which doesn't compile for the
case you could (and should) have trivially checked. A little edumacation
never hurt :-)

-- 
Jens Axboe

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