On Tue, Apr 5, 2011 at 1:39 PM, Bernd Schmidt <ber...@codesourcery.com> wrote: > On 04/05/2011 08:26 AM, Steven Bosscher wrote: >> I don't understand, really, why it's such a big deal to revert a patch >> quickly if it broke something. > > To answer this as well, firstly a proposal that comes with a request to > revert the wrong patch discredits itself.
Agreed. Note that in this particular case (and in most cases I can remember) the commit that broke things was identified correctly. This is what HJ's autotester is really good at. > Breaking stuff by accident is a fact of life with gcc. Definitely agreed. See PR48441. > You have to give > people the chance to investigate and understand the problems. Since I > know what it's like to break things by accident, I don't like to shout > and complain at others when it happens to them, especially since it's > never been more than an inconvenience for me if a particular revision of > trunk was broken. I just use an earlier one, or revert the problematic > patch. That is what most people do. The breakage wasn't much of a concern to me except for the duration and the point about the autotesters. In my perception, there was no shouting and not that much complaining. People reported breakage, and some people even tried to help figure out what was wrong (that is now I noticed the incorrect use of the VEC stuff). But the part of the compiler that you touched is not well known to most developers. Maybe two or three people really know that code, and you're one of them. No-one else could have investigated and understood the problem properly in such a short time. However, my point is that developers can investigate breakage without keeping the trunk broken. It is easy to revert a patch, investigate off-line, and come back for another try if the problem is identified and fixed. Your point of view is that it's OK to keep the tree broken while one developer is investigating a problem. My point of view is that it is not right to inconvenience other developers like this. > Actually, this happened _after_ I checked in the fix for the bootstrap > issue (well, HJ checked it in without waiting for the test results). > When the tree was working again, you, HJ and bkoz decided that my > patches needed to be reverted, based on no actual facts whatsoever. This > demonstrates that we need to be careful, and that the decision to revert > something cannot be left to the whims of random people. I had hopes that HJ, bkoz, Pinski and I are not "random people", but I suppose that's misplaced arrogance ;-) The proposal is not to let random people decide, but even if it did then a proposal is something to discuss and to find a compromise. If you are open to other points of view and willing to find common ground, then we should be talking about what would be an acceptable change of the 48hr policy instead. That'd be more constructive. > Once I managed to reproduce the problem I gave an ETA for the fix. After > that (on Sunday and early Monday) there was little activity on the bug. > No one asked me to revert anything until _after_ the problem was fixed. I don't think anyone expected you to _not_ revert the patches in the mean time, actually :-) It's what I would have done if I'd be in a situation like this, and what happened most of the time in similar situations in recent history. But that's not currently required and you didn't do anything wrong AFAICT. It's just that the pace of checkins/checkouts in GCC is so fast these days, that the 48hr policy seems like a dinosaur to me :-) Ciao! Steven
