On Tue, 13 Nov 2007 21:00:30 +0100 (CET) Christian Kujau <lists@nerdbynature.de> wrote:
Problem is that everyone would then sit around pumping shiny new features
into their trees waiting until someone else fixes the regressions.
There are a number of process things we _could_ do. Like
- have bugfix-only kernel releases
- Just refuse to merge any non-bugfix patches for a subsystem when it is
determined that the subsystem has "too many" regressions.
- Create an "if you added a regression, you should fix some other bug
too" rule.
- probably other stuff.
But we can't/shouldn't do any of that until it is generally agreed that we
have a problem and that the problem is of sufficient magnitude that process
changes are needed to address it. We aren't at that stage yet.
Here's an important point: developers have a fixed amount of development
time. They spend some of that time fixing bugs and the rest of that time
on <otherstuff>. And while one could cook up all sorts of wonderful
process changes, they all would be aimed at a single thing: shifting some
of the developers' time away from <otherstuff> and onto bugfixing.
At this stage the only tool which is being deployed to attempt to bring
about that reprioritisation is suasion. aka "lkml flamewar".
-
