Messages in this thread | | | Date | Tue, 19 Jun 2007 10:04:58 -0700 (PDT) | From | Linus Torvalds <> | Subject | Re: This is [Re:] How to improve the quality of the kernel[?]. |
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On Tue, 19 Jun 2007, Oleg Verych wrote: > > I'm proposing kind of smart tracking, summarized before. I'm not an > idealist, doing manual work. Making tools -- is what i've picked up from > one of your mails. Thus hope of having more opinions on that.
Don't get me wrong, I wasn't actually responing to you personally, I was actually responding mostly to the tone of this thread.
So I was responding to things like the example from Bartlomiej about missed opportunity for taking developer review into account (and btw, I think a little public shaming might not be a bad idea - I believe more in *social* rules than in *technical* rules), and I'm responding to some of the commentary by Adrian and others about "no regressions *ever*".
These are things we can *wish* for. But the fact that we migth wish for them doesn't actually mean that they are really good ideas to aim for in practice.
Let me put it another way: a few weeks ago there was this big news story in the New York Times about how "forgetting" is a very essential part about remembering, and people passed this around as if it was a big revelation. People think that people with good memories have a "good thing".
And personally, I was like "Duh".
Good memory is not about remembering everything. Good memory is about forgetting the irrelevant, so that the important stuff stands out and you *can* remember it. But the big deal is that yes, you have to forget stuff, and that means that you *will* miss details - but you'll hopefully miss the stuff you don't care for. The keyword being "hopefully". It works most of the time, but we all know we've sometimes been able to forget a detail that turned out to be crucial after all.
So the *stupid* response to that is "we should remember everything". It misses the point. Yes, we sometimes forget even important details, but it's *so* important to forget details, that the fact that our brains occasionally forget things we later ended up needing is still *much* preferable to trying to remember everything.
The same tends to be true of bug hunting, and regression tracking.
There's a lot of "noise" there. We'll never get perfect, and I'll argue that if we don't have a system that tries to actively *remove* noise, we'll just be overwhelmed. But that _inevitably_ means that sometimes there was actually a signal in the noise that we ended up removing, because nobody saw it as anything but noise.
So I think people should concentrate on turning "noise" into "clear signal", but at the same time remember that that inevitably is a "lossy" transformation, and just accept the fact that it will mean that we occasionally make "mistakes".
This is why I've been advocating bugzilla "forget" stuff, for example. I tend to see bugzilla as a place where noise accumulates, rather than a place where noise is made into a signal.
Which gets my to the real issue I have: the notion of having a process for _tracking_ all the information is actually totally counter-productive, if a big part of the process isn't also about throwing noise away.
We don't want to "save" all the crud. I don't want "smart tracking" to keep track of everything. I want "smart forgetting", so that we are only left with the major signal - the stuff that matters.
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