Re: [Ksummit-discuss] [MAINTAINERS SUMMIT] Bug-introducing patches

[James Bottomley <James.Bottomley@HansenPartnership.com>]

On Tue, 2018-09-11 at 10:02 -0700, Guenter Roeck wrote:
> On Tue, Sep 11, 2018 at 12:18:53PM +0100, Mark Brown wrote:
> > On Mon, Sep 10, 2018 at 02:20:19PM -0700, Guenter Roeck wrote:
> > 
> > > Would that help ? -next has been more or less unusable for a week
> > > or so. Maybe it is just a bad time (it hasn't been as bad as it
> > > is right now for quite some time), but Build results:
> > > 	total: 135 pass: 133 fail: 2
> > > Qemu test results:
> > > 	total: 315 pass: 112 fail: 203
> > > on next-20180910 doesn't really make me very confident that
> > > useful regression tests on -next are even possible. it seems to
> > > me that -next is quite often used as dumping ground for sparsely
> > > tested changes, and is far from "ready for upstream".
> > 
> > I suspect this is something where if someone starts consistently
> > reporting test results things will get a lot better if someone
> > consistently reports test results and chases people to fix
> > problems.  I expect it to go like builds - used to see huge numbers
> > of build and boot failures in -next, and even in mainline, but ever
> > since people started actively pushing on them the results have got
> > much better to the point where it's the exeception rather than the
> > rule.  You can see it happening if you look at the build
> > error/warning results from releases over a few years (stable
> > doesn't show it so clearly any more as a lot of these fixes got
> > backported there).
> > 
> 
> FWIW, for the most part I stopped reporting issues with -next after
> some people yelled at me for the 'noise' I was creating. Along the
> line of "This has been fixed in branch xxx; why don't you do your
> homework and check there", with branch xxx not even being in -next. I
> don't mind "this has already been reported/fixed", quite the
> contrary, but the "why don't you do your homework" got me over the
> edge.

Not to excuse rudeness, we always try to be polite on lists when this
happens, but -next builds on Australian time, so when we find and fix
an issue there can be up to 24h before it propagates.  In that time,
particularly if it's a stupid bug, it gets picked up and flagged by a
number of self contained 0day type projects and possibly a couple of
coccinelle type ones as well.  It does get a bit repetitive for
maintainers to receive and have to respond to 4 or 5 bug reports for
something they just fixed ...

Perhaps the -next tracking projects could have some sort of co-
ordination list to prevent the five bug reports for the same issue
problem?

James