Re: Slow DOWN, please!!!

Stephen Clark
2008-05-01T18:33:19Z

Nigel Cunningham wrote:
> Hi.
>
> On Wed, 2008-04-30 at 18:40 -0700, Linus Torvalds wrote:
>> The thing is, the quality of individual patches isn't what matters! What
>> matters is the quality of the end result. And people are going to be a lot
>> more involved in looking at, testing, and working with code that is
>> merged, rather than code that isn't.
>
> No. People generally expect that code that has been merged does work, so
> they don't look at it unless they're forced to (by a bug or the desire
> to make further modifications in that code) and they don't explicitly
> seek to test it. They just seek to use it.
>
> When it doesn't work, some of us will go and seek to find the cause,
> others (most?) will simply roll back to whatever they last found to be
> reliable.
>
> Out of tree code has the same issues.
>
> The only time code really gets looked at and tested is when there's a
> problem, or when people are explicitly choosing to inspect it (pre-merge
> reviews, eg).
>
> So my answer to the "how do we raise quality" question would be that
> when writing the code, we put time and effort into properly analysing
> the problem and developing a solution, we put time and effort into
> carefully testing the solution, and we put code in that will help the
> end-user help us to debug issues later (without them necessarily needing
> to git-bisect). After all, good software isn't the result of random (or
> semi-random), unconsidered modifications, but of planning, thought and
> attention to detail.
>
> In other words, I'm arguing that the speed of merging should be
> irrelevant. What's relevant is the quality of the work done in the first
> place.
>
> If you want better quality code, penalise the people who get buggy code
> merged. Give them a reason to get it in a better state before they try
> to merge. Of course Linus alone can't do that.
>
> Nigel
>
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Amen!

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