On Mon, 2005-02-28 at 00:05, Zdenek Dvorak wrote:

> at the beginning of the stage 1, there always is lot of major changes
> queued up.  It never lead to unmanageable amount of "breakage and
> disruption".
Then you clearly haven't tried to maintain a port other than x86-* or
*-linux.

The fact is that the vast majority of changes are only being tested on
these platforms and get very little exposure elsewhere.  If one change
goes into the trunk and breaks things that's manageable.  If two get in
at the same time then the nightmare starts to unfold.

Merging too many things at a time makes tracking down the root cause of
the problem a nightmare.  How do you bootstrap the latest version to
check that a fix has worked when something else has been broken in the
mean time.

It takes time to test things properly and some platforms are slower at
doing this than others.  There are maintained architectures where a full
bootstrap/test sequence takes at least 48 hours.  So introducing changes
more rapidly than this is going to lead to problems sometime, and the
bigger the change the more likely the problem.

R.

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