Re: [RFC PATCH v1 2/2] docs: reporting-issues: make everyone CC the regressions list

Greg KH
2021-04-07T14:58:08Z

On Wed, Apr 07, 2021 at 01:21:28PM +0200, Thorsten Leemhuis wrote:
>
> On 07.04.21 12:00, Greg KH wrote:
> > On Wed, Apr 07, 2021 at 11:21:56AM +0200, Thorsten Leemhuis wrote:
> >> Make people CC the recently created mailing list dedicated to Linux
> >> kernel regressions when reporting one. Some paragraphs had to be
> >> reshuffled and slightly rewritten during the process, as the text
> >> otherwise would have gotten unnecessarily hard to follow.
> >>
> >> The new text also makes reporters include a line useful for automatic
> >> regression tracking solution which does not exist yet, but is planned.
> >> The term "#regzb" (short for regression bot) is inspired by the "#syz"
> >> which can be used to communicate with syszbot (see
> >> https://github.com/google/syzkaller/blob/master/docs/syzbot.md).
> >
> > While I understand the wish to automate things like this, the #syz
> > marking will actually cause something to go off and do some work, and is
> > only relevant for a very small number of developers, all of whom know to
> > look up the instructions before doing so. But the #regzb marking will
> > be requested to be added by random users who never have submitted a
> > problem report before, OR from long-time kernel developers who are lucky
> > to ever remember to read the documentation as they "know" how to do
> > this.
> >
> > So this increased workload by people on the two ends of experience is
> > going to be rough, I predict a very low rate of adoption :(
>
> Yup, I'm aware of that. And also well aware that I will need to keep an
> eye on things and jump in and reply with mails to add such tags every
> time they are missing.
> But I think that direction it the best shot, as tying putting all the
> burden on one person (me) is likely to fail, as our history with
> regression tracking showed. And I think such tags with some bot in the
> background
> (as outlined roughly in
> https://linux-regtracking.leemhuis.info/post/hello-world/ ) have at
> least the best chance, as things are not out-of-band like tracking them
> in bugzilla would be – or do you think that would be a better approach
> together with its email-interface?

Ok, we can try it, I'm not going to say it's not going to work, just
that it's going to be a marketing effort to tell people how to do this
:)

> > What is the tag going to be good for? The reports will need to be
> > handled by a person anyway and classified and tracked out-of-band from
> > the list somehow. Will a tag do all that much here?
>
> I think is has, as then a good regression report will make the
> still-to-be-written regression-bot create and entry that links to the
> report and send a reply with a unique ID; then that ID needs to end up
> in the commit that fixes the regression later (similar to how the IDs
> for issues found by syzbot are mentioned there, which afaics works quite
> well for people) and the regression-bot can close the entry automatically.

Ah, ok, that makes more sense, nevermind, no objection from me, sorry
for the noise.

thanks,

greg k-h