Re: Bugzilla bug tracking database for 2.5 now available.

Patrick Finnegan
2002-11-15T03:48:27Z

On Thu, 14 Nov 2002, Thomas Molina wrote:

> On Thu, 14 Nov 2002, Andrew Morton wrote:
>
> > "Martin J. Bligh" wrote:
> > >
> > > > While I have this on my mind I want to express this now since the
> > > > very first bug that hit my mailbox had this issue.
> > > >
> > > > I want to suggest that all reported bug in the database must be
> > > > reporducable with some release done by Linus or his BK sources.
> > > > And also that we can automatically close any BUG submissions that
> > > > have other patches applied.
> > >
> > > Hmmm ... I'm not sure that being that restrictive is going to help.
> > > Whilst bugs against any randomly patched version of the kernel
> > > probably aren't that interesting, things in major trees like -mm,
> > > -ac, -dj etc are likely going to end up in mainline sooner or later
> > > anyway ... wouldn't you rather know of the breakage sooner rather
> > > than later?
> >
> > So people will need to use their judgement as to whether the
> > problem is in 2.5.47, or in the -bk snapshot which was taken from
> > Linus, or in the -mm addons.
> >
> > If in doubt, people should go for the mailing list first. Because
> >
> > a) the response time will be better
> > b) more people will see it
> > c) the owners of the add-on patches can screen it quickly.
>
> Has my 2.5 Problem Report Status postings been useful? If so, when I
> discussed this with Martin one of the roles we agreed I would play was
> taking bug reports from the list and adding them to bugzilla. I'll also
> be a "filter" for some of the issues discussed in this thread, sort of a
> janitor if you will.
>
> My question is how should compile failures figure into the bug database?
> Most of the compile failures are typos or thinkos that get quickly fixed.
> Should they get tracked, or dismissed quickly unless they linger on. I
> didn't track simple compile failures in my list.

It'd be nice if people simply tried compiling a patched kernel (all
affected modules) before they submitted the patch, I'm betting you'd catch
a lot of typos. Also, compiling _everything_, even as a module, at
least once before sumbitting the patch would probably help.

I'm sure people will miss one or two still, but so far I've found a fairly
high hit rate of things that simply won't compile in 2.5.x - also the main
reason that I hadn't actually used a 2.5.x kernel until now.

Pat
--
Purdue Universtiy ITAP/RCS
Information Technology at Purdue
Research Computing and Storage