Re: Slow DOWN, please!!!

Linus Torvalds
2008-04-30T20:32:07Z

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.

I think we have fairly good penetration these days with the regular -git
tree, but I think that one is quite frankly a *lot* less scary than -mm or
-next are, and there it has been an absolutely huge boon to get the kernel
into the Fedora test-builds etc (and I _think_ Ubuntu and SuSE also
started something like that).

So I'm very pessimistic about getting a lot of test coverage before -rc1.

Maybe too pessimistic, who knows?

Linus