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

[Theodore Ts'o]

On Wed, Oct 23, 2024 at 11:06:59AM -0700, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> 
> So automation that says "this tree does not actually work" would very
> much be appreciated. I'd prefer them to be the same kind of "before
> the pull request has even been sent" situation, of course, but if
> problems _remain_ in linux-next, and pr-bot sees the pull request, I'd
> actually like automation that says "Oh, this tree has these issues:
> ..."

As I think I mentioned at the Maintainer's Summit, for the past 2 or 3
months, I've been running xfstests autmation for ext4, xfs, f2fs, and
btrfs on the fs-next branch of the linux-next tree, and it's actually
been quite stable.  That's because most of the fs developers are
pretty careful about running tests *before* publishing their branches
to linux-next, so it hasn't had the boot failures whichhas caused fs
testing on the full linux-next branch to be more painful.  Yes, I know
that solution doesn't scale but it works for us.  :-)

An example of how this has worked out is a regression which popped up
a few days ago, causing generic/564 to fail for ext4, xfs, f2fs, and
btrfs, and which was fixed by reverting "vfs: Fix implicit conversion
problem when testing overflow case".  I expect Christian will be
dropping that commit (or replacing it with a fixed patch) from the vfs
tree long before he sends a pull request to you.

       	    	    	      	     	- Ted