On Sun, 10 Dec 2006, Chris Wedgwood wrote:
>
> Well, it's not clear to me that reverting to a quirk the pokes *all*
> VIA pci devices on all machines is safe, it's not even clear if it was
> a good idea to merge this.
I'm just saying that the stable tree should never merge anything that can
possibly cause a regression.
> Well, I think the current 2.6.16.x release series is already broken on
> some other subset of hardware.
That's not the point. If it was broken on some subset of hardware, as long
as it's not a REGRESSION from 2.6.16, that's better than _changing_ the
breakage. And no, it doesn't really matter how many machines are affected
(ie it's not better to have a "smaller" set of cases that break, unless
it's a _strict_ subset).
The reason? It's better to be _dependable_ than to work on a maximum
number of machines. This is why _regressions_ are always much worse than
old bugs. It's much better to have "it didn't work before, and it still
doesn't work" than to have "it used to work, but now it broke".
Because people for whom something used to work should always be able to
update to a new kernel without having to constantly worry.
So for the _stable_ series, if you don't understand the problem 100%, and
you don't know that something really fixes something and never causes
regressions, such a patch simply SHOULD NOT be applied. It's that easy.
(And the argument that it "fixes more than it breaks" is a total garbage
argument for several reasons:
- you don't actually know that. You may have a lot of reports about
breakage that you think will be fixed (so you _think_ it fixes a lot),
but by definition you won't have any clue AT ALL about how much it will
break, since nobody will have tested it. The machines that weren't
broken before generally won't even bother to upgrade, so you'll find
out only much later.
- machines that didn't use to work well before are much less important
than machines that worked fine. People don't _expect_ them to work,
people don't have a history of them working. So if you fix ten machines
that didn't work before, but you break one that _did_ work before,
that's _still_ not actually a good deal. Because angst-wise, you
actually lost on it.
So please revert anythign that is even slightly open for debate in the
stable series. The whole point of the stable series is to be _stable_, and
regressions are bad.
Linus
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