Re: linus-next: improving functional testing for to-be-merged pull requests

Paul E. McKenney
2024-10-22T14:46:24Z

On Tue, Oct 22, 2024 at 10:36:13AM -0400, Sasha Levin wrote:
> On Tue, Oct 22, 2024 at 07:22:12AM -0700, Paul E. McKenney wrote:
> > On Tue, Oct 22, 2024 at 02:06:46PM +0200, Jiri Kosina wrote:
> > > On Mon, 21 Oct 2024, Paul E. McKenney wrote:
> > >
> > > > I have to ask...
> > > >
> > > > Wouldn't more people testing -next result in more pressure to fix
> > > > linux-next problems quickly?
> > >
> > > I believe I brought up pretty much exactly this at this year's maintainer
> > > summit.
> > >
> > > >From the discussion it turned out the many people believe that this
> > > investing into this is probably not worth it, as it will require much more
> > > continous, never-ending effort (for which there are probably not enough
> > > resources) than just dealing with the fallout once during the -rc1+ phase.
> >
> > Thank you for the response and the information!
> >
> > But why won't this same issues apply just as forcefully to a new
> > linus-next tree?
> >
> > Full disclosure: Testing and tracking down bugs in -next can be a bit of
> > a hassle, to be sure, but I expect to continue to do so. For one thing,
> > dealing with -next is way easier than testing patches on the various
> > mailing lists.
>
> I'm not trying to change the workflow here, I think all this amounts to
> is just a quality of life improvement for Linus who could ideally merge
> faster if he knows that the pull requests he's looking at will build and
> won't brick his laptop.

I don't understand how creating yet another tree will have that result,
but you have more direct experience with this aspect of the process than
I do. I do hope that it works out.

> If we start playing games around "must spend X days in linus-next", then
> yes - I agree with you.

I did see the later email indicating that Linus was dead-set against
such a requirement, so there is that. On the other hand, the subsequent
discussion of publicly documenting which commits had less testing seems
like it might work. For but one example, I would be suspicious of
commits coming from someone arguing that appearing frequently on that
list is a non-problem. ;-)

(Yes, yes, there are always exceptions.)

Thanx, Paul