Re: linus-next: improving functional testing for to-be-merged pull requests

Thorsten Leemhuis
2024-10-22T09:10:45Z

On 21.10.24 23:41, Mark Brown wrote:
> On Mon, Oct 21, 2024 at 12:07:13PM -0400, Sasha Levin wrote:
>
>> In an attempt to address the concerns, we're trying out a new "linus-next"
>> tree is being created and maintained with the following characteristics:

BTW, in case anyone cares: I fully agree with what Kees wrote earlier
today elsewhere in this thread, e.g. things like "improve -next instead"
and "pre-merge bot":
http://lore.kernel.org/all/792F4759-EA33-48B8-9AD0-FA14FA69E86E%40kernel.org

Regarding that bot: a few of the CI folks and a developer or two told me
they want regzbot to react to PRs for Linus as well, so it can send
mails like "hey Linus, just so you know, this PR contains changes that
cause the following regressions not yet fixed". I think I like the idea,
but well, quite a few other improvements around regzbot and its use have
a much higher priority currently.

>> 4. Continuous tree (not daily tags like in linux-next),
>> facilitating easier bisection
>
> Is this a pressing problem? I routinely bisect -next, you have to base
> things on Linus' tree (or pending-fixes) but otherwise it's not
> especially problematic.

I wonder if part of this is a "don't know how to do that" aka "lack of
documentation" problem. I've recently seen some good guide or mailing
list post how to bisect -next somewhere, but I think it wasn't in our
Documentation/ directory. I need to search where that was (Mark, I might
misremember, but wasn't it you who posted it somewhere?) and could work
towards upstreaming that or some other guide. And don't worry, due to
the different target audience it would be much shorter text than other
documents I contributed. ;-)

Ciao, Thorsten