>> >> But believe me, the world won't end if your on vacation for a couple of >> weeks, even though some BUGs could sneak in ... e.g., lately I try to >> review as much as I can on the MM list (and Michal is steadily watching >> out as well). > > Sure, the world will still be running, but good luck on solely rely on reviewing with bare eyes before merging. That's why we have linux-next and plenty of people playing with it (including you and me for example). > >> >> The solution to your problem is more review and testing, really. E.g., >> I'd be very happy if other developers would test their patches more >> thoroughly and if there would be more review activity on the MM list in >> general (my patches barely get any review ... and I sent a lot of fixes >> lately). > > Of course, that helps but it is a culture that very difficult to change now. How many times I saw even high-profile developers proudly sent out patches labeled “no testing” explicitly and implicitly ? > That is a different story, and I do agree that we should be more careful with such things. Personally, I test whatever I send upstream - as long as there is a way for me to test. We can only change this culture slowly - but frankly speaking "no small cleanups" is just the wrong approach to this problem. [...] >> BTW: [1] mentions "unbalanced software development culture with regard >> to quality vs quantity that supplies an endless stream of bugs". I don't >> agree to this statement. There will *always* be an endless stream of >> BUGs - and most of them come from new features and performance >> improvements IMHO. To me, cleanups and refactorings are important tools >> to improve the software quality (and reduce the code size). All we can >> do is try to minimize the number of BUGs - e.g., via more code review, >> manual testing, automatic testing, and by actually understanding the >> code. Cleanups/refactorings can even fix undiscovered BUGs (e.g., latest >> example is [2]) > > Surely, most of people probably don’t care about those endless bugs because Linux is a monopoly in data center and open source and it is always like this since Linux was born as a hobby project. > Well, working for a distribution I do care a lot :) Again, your work is highly appreciated, but you are trying to use a questionable approach (limit code changes) to solve a fundamental problem (people not testing stuff, lack of review). -- Thanks, David / dhildenb
