From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S1756577AbYEAFKi (ORCPT ); Thu, 1 May 2008 01:10:38 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S1752733AbYEAFK0 (ORCPT ); Thu, 1 May 2008 01:10:26 -0400 Received: from 1wt.eu ([62.212.114.60]:3657 "EHLO 1wt.eu" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1752727AbYEAFKZ (ORCPT ); Thu, 1 May 2008 01:10:25 -0400 Date: Thu, 1 May 2008 07:09:52 +0200 From: Willy Tarreau To: Chris Shoemaker Cc: "Rafael J. Wysocki" , David Miller , mingo@elte.hu, akpm@linux-foundation.org, torvalds@linux-foundation.org, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, jirislaby@gmail.com Subject: Re: Slow DOWN, please!!! Message-ID: <20080501050952.GA18597@1wt.eu> References: <20080430135405.ddc42075.akpm@linux-foundation.org> <20080430221936.GA27292@elte.hu> <20080430.152227.23100100.davem@davemloft.net> <200805010039.02451.rjw@sisk.pl> <20080430231221.GP8474@1wt.eu> <20080501001500.GC1559@pe.Belkin> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: <20080501001500.GC1559@pe.Belkin> User-Agent: Mutt/1.5.11 Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org On Wed, Apr 30, 2008 at 08:15:00PM -0400, Chris Shoemaker wrote: > On Thu, May 01, 2008 at 01:12:21AM +0200, Willy Tarreau wrote: > > On Thu, May 01, 2008 at 12:39:01AM +0200, Rafael J. Wysocki wrote: > > > In fact, so many changes go in at a time during a merge window, that we often > > > can't really say which of them causes the breakage observed by testers and > > > bisection, that IMO should really be a last-resort tool, is used on the main > > > debugging techinque. > > > > Maybe we could slightly improve the process by releasing more often, but > > based on topics. Small sets of minimally-overlapping topics would get > > merged in each release, and other topics would only be allowed to pull > > fixes. That way everybody still gets some work merged, everybody tests > > and problems are more easily spotted. > > > > I know this is in part what Andrew tries to do when proposing to > > integrate trees, but maybe some approximate rules should be proposed > > in order for developers to organize their works. This would begin > > with announcing topics to be considered for next branch very early. > > This would also make it more natural for developers to have creation > > and bug-tracking phases. > > What would this look like, notionally? Say the releases were twice as > frequent with Stage A and Stage B. How could the topic be grouped > into the stages? Could bugfixes of any type be merged in either > window? Would this only apply to "new" features, API changes, etc? or > would maintenance-type changes have to be assigned to a stage, too? bug fixes are of course always possible, just that we limit important changes, i.e. the ones which randomly break and that take a lot of time to track down because everyone has changed something. > -chris willy