On Fri, 25 Jan 2008 10:10:11 +0100, "Giacomo A. Catenazzi" said:

quoted text
> As a tester I would like:
> - slow merges, so that developer could rebase and test
>    (compile test) the interaction of the new code.

An amazing amount of stuff gets caught when it's tested in Andrew Morton's -mm
tree.  You think -rc1's are bad now, consider that much of what will be
25-rc1 already got tried as 24-rc6-mm1 and 24-rc8-mm1.  Without those, the
-rc1 releases would be truly horrific.. ;)

quoted text
> - you will introduce a new step on git management:
>    Every changeset is compile-tested before going out to the world.
>    I think this can be done automatically, and I think that one or
>    two configurations are enough to find most of the problems.

It's true that a compile on x86 and a compile on PowerPC should flush out
most of the truly stupid mistakes, but those are usually found and fixed
literally within hours.  Anyhow, the proper time for test compiles is *before*
it goes into the git trees at all - it should have been tested before it
gets sent to a maintainer for inclusion.

Plus, there's a *lot* of issues that "one or two configurations" won't
find - we continually find build issues that literally depend on 3 or 4
different CONFIG_* settings, and only misbehave for one specific combination.
And all the things that compile clean but explode at runtime.