Re: [PATCH 2/4] XFS: Use the inode tree for finding dirty inodes

Dave Chinner
2008-07-23T04:17:49Z

On Wed, Jul 23, 2008 at 12:10:03PM +1000, Mark Goodwin wrote:
>
>
> Dave Chinner wrote:
>> On Tue, Jul 22, 2008 at 03:27:33AM -0400, Christoph Hellwig wrote:
>>> ...
>>> I only fear
>>> we'll never get it in with the current review and commit latencies
>>> for XFS :(
>>
>> I can see this being a big issue in the not-too-distant future.....
>
> [getting off-topic for this thread, but anyway ..]
> This is already a big issue, obviously, and has been for some time.
>
> Internally, we're attempting to refine our patch acceptance processes,
> (e.g. gitify our internal dev tree and mirror it on oss so it's much
> easier to push back out to oss). But the QA overhead remains a stubborn
> problem. I think we're going to have to ask for QA tests (both regression
> and performance) to be written as part of the patch acceptance policy -
> under this policy, merely passing existing QA will not be sufficient.
> Comments?

In general - unnecessary because most changes submitted don't
change behaviour or interfaces or that subsystem/behaviour
is already tested by the QA suite. For new features with externally
visable interfaces (the rare case) then requiring new tests is
just fine.

In reality - the community will route around SGI and go straight
to Andrew or Linus if this proves to be a burden.

Passing XFSQA is a significant indication that the change is as good
as the developer can do in their own environment; if it passes
review then at that point it needs wider QA, and that comes from
committing to *public repositories* so that and varied workloads and
machines stress the code.

If QA is a burden, it's because you're not allowing the wider
community easy access to the dev code to test at an early
stage. A dev tree is *meant to break*, it's not a prodution
environment. Gett eh code out there early and distribute the
QA workload, don't make it a burden on the developers or
a bottleneck to getting code accepted.

> We have recently set up external access to a system for QA and
> regression testing for Christoph's use .. perhaps that should
> be a permanent offering?

Yes.

Cheers,

Dave.
--
Dave Chinner
david@fromorbit.com