Messages in this thread | | | From | Geert Uytterhoeven <> | Date | Wed, 2 May 2018 22:41:56 +0200 | Subject | Re: bug-introducing patches |
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Hi Sasha,
On Wed, May 2, 2018 at 9:51 PM, Sasha Levin <Alexander.Levin@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.Levin@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 -- geert@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
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