On Thu, Jun 20, 2024 at 10:01:57AM -0400, James Bottomley wrote:
> On Thu, 2024-06-20 at 14:55 +0100, Mark Brown wrote:

> > If your tests take more than a day to run then it gets more tricky,
> > but that's just generally harder no matter which tree you're testing.

> The difficulty is usually that by the time you get a signal something
> is wrong, the next tree is different.  I agree you can freeze on the

That'd be the tests taking more than a day bit.

> next tree you have and hope that the identified commit (by the time you
> find it) is still in the current version of -next, but there is a non-
> zero chance it would get rebased which makes testing next a bit more of
> a chore than testing main, which is why it's tested less often than
> main

Obviously some trees do rebase, but not constantly and a lot of trees
simply don't rebase - carrying things forward to the next day tends to
be more of a mild annoyance IME, especially if you remember all the good
and bad commits and don't need to restart from scratch.

> Regardless, I don't think -next is a useful tree for the wider pool who
> usually test stable to try because of all the difficulties.  I do think
> it's not impossible to get some of them to move up to main (after all
> it's the .0 of stable).

AFAICT we have a far wider pool of people testing -next than we do
testing the stable -rcs at the minute, there's more people trying to
*use* stables and finding issues but that's not quite the same thing and
I suspect much of the plain testing is going to be qualification for
release so it'd be hard to get people to substitute mainline.