Re: Slow DOWN, please!!!

Rafael J. Wysocki
2008-04-30T21:31:09Z

On Wednesday, 30 of April 2008, Andrew Morton wrote:
> On Wed, 30 Apr 2008 16:47:00 -0400
> Dan Noe <dpn@isomerica.net> wrote:
>
> > On 4/30/2008 16:31, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> > >
> > > On Wed, 30 Apr 2008, Andrew Morton wrote:
> > >> <jumps up and down>
> > >>
> > >> There should be nothing in 2.6.x-rc1 which wasn't in 2.6.x-mm1!
> > >
> > > The problem I see with both -mm and linux-next is that they tend to be
> > > better at finding the "physical conflict" kind of issues (ie the merge
> > > itself fails) than the "code looks ok but doesn't actually work" kind of
> > > issue.
> > >
> > > Why?
> > >
> > > The tester base is simply too small.
> > >
> > > Now, if *that* could be improved, that would be wonderful, but I'm not
> > > seeing it as very likely.
> >
> > Perhaps we should be clear and simple about what potential testers
> > should be running at any given point in time. With -mm, linux-next,
> > linux-2.6, etc, as a newcomer I find it difficult to know where my
> > testing time and energy is best directed.
>
> -mm consists of the sum of
>
> a) the ~80 subsytem maintainers trees (git and quilt)
>
> b) the ~100 subsytem trees which are hosted only in -mm.
>
>
> linux-next consists of only a)
>
> Soon I shall remove a) from -mm and will replace it with linux-next (this
> should be a no-op).
>
> Later, I shall start feeding those 100 random subsystems into linux-next
> as well (somehow).
>
> > Is linux-next the right thing to be running at this point?
>
> yes. 85% of the code which goes into Linux goes via the ~80 subsystem
> maintainers' trees and is (or should be) in linux-next. The other 15%
> is the hosted-in-mm work.
>
> > Is there a
> > need for testing in a particular tree (netdev, x86, etc)?
>
> No, please test the sum-of-all-trees in linux-next. If you hit problems
> then, as part of the problem resolving process a developer _might_ ask you
> to test one tree specifically, but that would be a pretty unusual
> circumstance.

How bisectable is linux-next, BTW?