Re: linus-next: improving functional testing for to-be-merged pull requests

From: Sasha Levin
Date: Tue Oct 22 2024 - 10:36:35 EST


On Tue, Oct 22, 2024 at 07:22:12AM -0700, Paul E. McKenney wrote:
On Tue, Oct 22, 2024 at 02:06:46PM +0200, Jiri Kosina wrote:
On Mon, 21 Oct 2024, Paul E. McKenney wrote:

> I have to ask...
>
> Wouldn't more people testing -next result in more pressure to fix
> linux-next problems quickly?

I believe I brought up pretty much exactly this at this year's maintainer
summit.

>From the discussion it turned out the many people believe that this
investing into this is probably not worth it, as it will require much more
continous, never-ending effort (for which there are probably not enough
resources) than just dealing with the fallout once during the -rc1+ phase.

Thank you for the response and the information!

But why won't this same issues apply just as forcefully to a new
linus-next tree?

Full disclosure: Testing and tracking down bugs in -next can be a bit of
a hassle, to be sure, but I expect to continue to do so. For one thing,
dealing with -next is way easier than testing patches on the various
mailing lists.

I'm not trying to change the workflow here, I think all this amounts to
is just a quality of life improvement for Linus who could ideally merge
faster if he knows that the pull requests he's looking at will build and
won't brick his laptop.

If we start playing games around "must spend X days in linus-next", then
yes - I agree with you.

--
Thanks,
Sasha