Hi Sasha,
On Wed, May 2, 2018 at 9:51 PM, Sasha Levin
<alexander.le...@microsoft.com> wrote:
> On Wed, May 02, 2018 at 05:32:37PM +0200, Geert Uytterhoeven wrote:
>>On Tue, May 1, 2018 at 6:38 PM, Sasha Levin
>><alexander.le...@microsoft.com> wrote:
>>> Working on AUTOSEL, it became even more obvious to me how difficult it is
>>> for a
>>> patch to get a proper review. Maintainers found it difficult to keep up with
>>> the upstream work for their subsystem, and reviewing additional -stable
>>> patches
>>> put even more load on them which some suggested would be more than what they
>>> can handle.
>>
>>Thanks for your work!
>>
>>> - For some reason, the odds of a -rc commit to be targetted for -stable is
>>> over 20%, while for merge window commits it's about 3%. I can't quite
>>> explain why that happens, but this would suggest that -rc commits end up
>>> hurting -stable pretty badly.
>>
>>Aren't more -rc commits targeted for -stable because they are bugfixes?
>>Ideally, new features are supposed to be merged during the merge window,
>>while -rc commits fix bugs.
>
> new features can only be merged during a merge window, bug fixes can
> be merged at any point.
I wrote "ideally". There's a big difference between theory and practice...
>>So they can be categorized like:
>> 1. Plain -rc commits,
>
> What's this exactly? -rc commits are only supposed to fix bugs.
... hence not all of them are fixes.
Sometimes fast-tracking a new feature or API reduces dependencies for the
next merge window. This is just one example of IMHO valid non-bugfix
-rc commits.
Between v4.17-rc1 and v4.17-rc3, there are 660 non-merge commits, of which
- 245 carry a Fixes tag,
- 196 carry a CC stable,
- 395 contain the string "fix".
(non-mutually exclusive)
That leaves us with 200 commits not falling in the bugfix category.
>> 2. -rc commits fixing a bug:
>> a. in the same release cycle,
>> b. in a previous release.
>>
>>2a assumes the bug was backported to -stable, too, doesn't it?
>
> Bug fixes for features introduced in that release cycle won't be
> backported to stable.
They do, if the original commit was introduced during the same cycle and
backported to stable.
>>Do you have statistics for which categories are most buggy?
>
> I haven't broken it down to subsystems for a few reasons:
I didn't mean break down by subsystem, but by category from the list above
(1, 2a, 2b).
Gr{oetje,eeting}s,
Geert
--
Geert Uytterhoeven -- There's lots of Linux beyond ia32 -- ge...@linux-m68k.org
In personal conversations with technical people, I call myself a hacker. But
when I'm talking to journalists I just say "programmer" or something like that.
-- Linus Torvalds
