Re: Slow DOWN, please!!!

[Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>]

On Wed, 30 Apr 2008 16:47:00 -0400
Dan Noe <dpn@isomerica.net> wrote:

> On 4/30/2008 16:31, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> > 
> > On Wed, 30 Apr 2008, Andrew Morton wrote:
> >> <jumps up and down>
> >>
> >> There should be nothing in 2.6.x-rc1 which wasn't in 2.6.x-mm1!
> > 
> > The problem I see with both -mm and linux-next is that they tend to be 
> > better at finding the "physical conflict" kind of issues (ie the merge 
> > itself fails) than the "code looks ok but doesn't actually work" kind of 
> > issue.
> > 
> > Why?
> > 
> > The tester base is simply too small.
> > 
> > Now, if *that* could be improved, that would be wonderful, but I'm not 
> > seeing it as very likely.
> 
> Perhaps we should be clear and simple about what potential testers 
> should be running at any given point in time.  With -mm, linux-next, 
> linux-2.6, etc, as a newcomer I find it difficult to know where my 
> testing time and energy is best directed.

-mm consists of the sum of

a) the ~80 subsytem maintainers trees (git and quilt)

b) the ~100 subsytem trees which are hosted only in -mm.


linux-next consists of only a)

Soon I shall remove a) from -mm and will replace it with linux-next (this
should be a no-op).

Later, I shall start feeding those 100 random subsystems into linux-next
as well (somehow).

> Is linux-next the right thing to be running at this point?

yes.  85% of the code which goes into Linux goes via the ~80 subsystem
maintainers' trees and is (or should be) in linux-next.  The other 15%
is the hosted-in-mm work.

>  Is there a 
> need for testing in a particular tree (netdev, x86, etc)?

No, please test the sum-of-all-trees in linux-next.  If you hit problems
then, as part of the problem resolving process a developer _might_ ask you
to test one tree specifically, but that would be a pretty unusual
circumstance.