Re: [Ksummit-discuss] [CORE TOPIC] [nomination] Move Fast and Oops Things

["John W. Linville" <linville@tuxdriver.com>]

On Thu, May 22, 2014 at 11:21:35PM -0700, James Bottomley wrote:
> On Thu, 2014-05-22 at 22:56 +0200, Geert Uytterhoeven wrote:
> > On Thu, May 22, 2014 at 10:31 PM, Dan Carpenter
> > <dan.carpenter@oracle.com> wrote:
> > > On Thu, May 22, 2014 at 09:31:44AM -0700, Dan Williams wrote:
> > >> I agree that something like this is prickly once it gets entangled
> > >> with ABI concerns.  But, I disagree with the speed argument... unless
> > >> you believe -staging has not increased the velocity of kernel
> > >> development?
> > >
> > > Staging is good because it brings more developers, but in many cases it
> > > is a slow down.  Merged codes has stricter rules where you have to write
> > > reviewable patches.  If there is a bug early in a patch series then you
> > > can't just fix it in a later patch, you need to redo the whole series.
> > 
> > In theory...
> > 
> > These days many fixes end up as separate commits in various subsystem
> > trees, due to "no rebase" rules and other regulations.
> 
> No, pretty much in practise.  I've no qualms about dropping a patch
> series if one of the git tree tests shows problems and, since I have a
> mostly linear tree, that means a rebase.
> 
>   I also don't believe in "preserving" history which is simply bug fixes
> that should have been in the series.  Sometimes, if the fix took a while
> to track down, I might keep the separate patch for credit + learning,
> but most of the time I'd fold it into a commit and annotate the commit.

That's all well and good, but rebasing causes a lot of pain.  This is
particularly true when you have downstream trees.

In any case, bugs will eventually show-up -- probably on the day after
you merge the 'final' series.  Hopefully those are not 'brown paper bag'
bugs, but you can only stall a series so long in hopes of shaking
those out.  You can only extend yourself so far in pursuit of bisectability.

John
-- 
John W. Linville		Someday the world will need a hero, and you
linville@tuxdriver.com			might be all we have.  Be ready.