Re: [ANNOUNCE] Reiserfs/kill-bkl tree v2

[Roland Dreier <rdreier@cisco.com>]

 > Well, dont waste too much time on it (beyond the due diligence 
 > level) - Andi forgot that the right way to stress-test patches is to 
 > get through the review process and then through the integration 
 > trees which have far more test exposure than any single contributor 
 > can test.
 > 
 > Patch submitters cannot possibly test every crazy possibility that 
 > is out there - nor should they: it just doesnt scale. What we expect 
 > people to do is to write clean patches, to test the bits on their 
 > own boxes and submit them to lkml and address specific review 
 > feedback.

I respectfully disagree in this case.  For patches that touch, say,
something hardware dependent where the patch submitter doesn't have all
the variations on the hardware, yes, I agree, scale the testing by
running the code on many machines.  But for the code in question, where
some very fundamental and complex changes are being made to filesystem
locking, I don't think that testing really scales -- after all, if there
is some race then it's quite likely that testers will just see some rare
filesystem corruption, which could easily waste weeks of debugging
before the BKL/reiserfs patches were even implicated.

 - R.