Re: [Ksummit-discuss] [CORE TOPIC] Issues with stable process

[Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>]

On Wed, Jul 15, 2015 at 6:05 PM, Andy Lutomirski <luto@amacapital.net> wrote:
>
> As of today, I'm much less convinced that -next is suitable for this
> purpose.  I have a really dumb, blatant, obvious regression sitting in
> -next right now, and it's been there for a couple of weeks with no one
> spotting it.  The 0-day bot didn't spot it either (and yes, I emailed
> Fengguang suggesting another test for the bot).

I think -next is supremely useful, but let's not kid ourselves: it's
useful because it catches compile problems (particularly on odd
architectures) and integration issues.

Very few people actually *run* linux-next. At best, it gets some
boot-testing on a farm or two. Maybe one or two brave souls actually
run it on their own machines (I think Andrew may, for example). But
that's it.

I suspect that (possibly with the exception of the merge window)
keeping bugfixes in -next for a few days is more likely to *delay*
testing than it is to make it better. I suspect a lot more people run
my -git trees than run -next.

So I don't think -next is a panacea for testing. Not at all. It is
very good for what it does, but I don't think people should believe
that "testing" is what it does.

                  Linus