Re: RFC: reviewer's statement of oversight

J. Bruce Fields
2007-10-08T18:53:50Z

On Mon, Oct 08, 2007 at 08:34:47PM +0200, Stefan Richter wrote:
> Randy Dunlap wrote:
> > On Mon, 08 Oct 2007 11:01:49 -0700 Jeremy Fitzhardinge wrote:
> >> Tested-by is more valuable than acked-by, because its empirical.
> >> Acked-by generally means "I don't generally object to the idea of the
> >> patch, but may not have read beyond the changelog". Tested-by implies
> >> "I did something that exercised the patch, and it didn't explode" -
> >> that's on par with an actual review (ideally all patches would be both
> >> tested and reviewed).
> >
> > but Tested-by: doesn't have to involve any "actually looking at/reading
> > the patch." Right?
> >
> > IOW, the patch could be ugly as sin but it works...
>
> Tested-by translated into German and back into English: "Works for me,
> test methods not specified."
>
> So, putting a Tested-by into the changelog is only useful if the
> necessary testing is rather simple (i.e. "fixed the bug which I was
> always able to reproduce before") or if the tester is known to have
> performed rigorous and sufficiently broad tests.

Well, you can still include those test-method details in the body of the
message in addition to adding the "Tested-by:".

Does "Tested-by" just mean they ran some relevant test on the final
version of the patch? The really hard part is often the initial work
required to find a good reproduceable test case, capture the right error
report, or bisect to the right commit. I think that also counts as
"testing". And it'd be nice to have a tag for those sorts of
contributions, partly just as another way to ackowledge them.

--b.