Re: Slow DOWN, please!!!

Rafael J. Wysocki
2008-04-30T20:21:16Z

On Wednesday, 30 of April 2008, Andrew Morton wrote:
> On Wed, 30 Apr 2008 21:36:57 +0200
> "Rafael J. Wysocki" <rjw@sisk.pl> wrote:
>
> > On Wednesday, 30 of April 2008, David Miller wrote:
> > >
> > > This is starting to get beyond frustrating for me.
> > >
> > > Yesterday, I spent the whole day bisecting boot failures
> > > on my system due to the totally untested linux/bitops.h
> > > optimization, which I fully analyzed and debugged.
> > >
> > > Today, I had hoped that I could get some work done of my
> > > own, but that's not the case.
> > >
> > > Yet another bootup regression got added within the last 24
> > > hours.
> > >
> > > I don't mind fixing the regression or two during the merge
> > > window but THIS IS ABSOLUTELY, FUCKING, REDICULIOUS!
> > >
> > > The tree breaks every day, and it's becomming an extremely
> > > non-fun environment to work in.
> > >
> > > We need to slow down the merging, we need to review things
> > > more, we need people to test their fucking changes!
> >
> > Well, I must say I second that.
>
> ooh, fun thread.
>
> One of the main reasons for -mm (probably _the_ main reason) is to weed out
> other-developer-impacting regressions before they hit mainline and, umm,
> affect developers.
>
> But there are implementation problems:
>
> a) developers aren't testing -mm enough
>
> b) -mm releases have become too slow, and (hence) too unstable
>
> c) people are slamming changes into mainline which have never been seen
> in -mm. Lots of changes.

Yeah.

> So here's how we're going to fix David's problem:
>
> - Everyone gets their stuff into linux-next.
>
> - Lots of people _test_ linux-next. Just once a week.

For this to happen, let's make the mainline change slower than once a day
after the merge window.

> Those two steps will improve the merge-window chaos a lot. Things will get
> better.

Not until we make a rule that nothing that didn't went through linux-next is
mergeable unless it's an obvious bugfix that has no side effects.

> The remaining open problem is what do we do about the shiny new code which
> is getting slammed into the merge window?
>
> Well, it's very easy to tell whether code which appears in the merge window
> was present in linux-next.
>
> Our first way of preventing people from shoving inadequately-cooked code
> into the merge window is suasion (aka flaming their titties off). If that
> proves insufficient and if we still have a sufficiently large problem that
> we need to do something about it then sure, let's reevaluate.

OK

> But one thing at a time. For the 2.6.27 release let us concentrte on two
> things
>
> - get your stuff into linux-next
>
> - test linux-next.
>
> If merge-window stability is still a problem after that then let's revisit?

I'll see you in the analogous thread during the next merge window. ;-)