Re: a dedicated list for build error reports?

Julia Lawall
2012-10-22T07:30:19Z

On Mon, 22 Oct 2012, Dan Carpenter wrote:

> On Thu, Oct 18, 2012 at 03:07:55PM -0400, David Miller wrote:
> > From: Fengguang Wu <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
> > Date: Thu, 18 Oct 2012 21:01:46 +0800
> >
> > > On Thu, Oct 18, 2012 at 03:45:22PM +0300, Dan Carpenter wrote:
> > >> On Wed, Oct 17, 2012 at 11:10:42AM +0200, Luis G.F wrote:
> > >> > unsubscribe kernel-janitors
> > >>
> > >> Uh. Obviously this isn't the right way to unsubscribe. You have to
> > >> send the email to majordomo@vger.kernel.org and not to the list.
> > >>
> > >> But I do think we should maybe find another list for Fengguang's
> > >> emails? It's sort of a lot higher traffic than before and sort of a
> > >> different flavour.
> > >
> > > Agreed.. I'm afraid that my report titles are much more messy than
> > > the normal emails and there could be a dozen of such reports per day.
> > >
> > > It may be more clean to send the build error/warning reports to a
> > > standalone list.
> > >
> > >> I still will want to subscribe to the emails, but it would be better
> > >> to use a different list. Apparently Dave Miller didn't like the
> > >> idea of creating a special list for it because he didn't like the
> > >> emails in the first place. But now I think everyone likes them a
> > >> lot. It might be worth asking again.
> > >
> > > CC Dave Miller for possible new inputs.
> >
> > I find them super annoying, and these reports are extremely sub-optimal
> > as is.
> >
> > The amount of time spent composing these reports could equally be spent
> > condensing the error down to a small, self contained, set of text
> > explaining the exact build failure and an initial root-cause estimate.
> > And sending it to the correct maintainer's list.
> >
> > Heck, in the same amount of time, you could even implement the damn
> > fix!
>
> My understanding is the emails are composed automatically and take
> zero time. If the error message has a very low false positive rate,
> then the email is sent without any human interaction at all.

Perhaps what would be useful for the kernel janitors list is one message
per day with one-line summaries of the affected files and the detected
problems? The goal of sending it to kernel janitors was just to avoid
duplicated work, and it seems like such summaries would do that just as
well, without inducing so many messages?

julia