this argument is a fallacy because it assumes that the Linux kernel is a
closed ecosystem and i'm really surprised to see you advance this
economic argument.
i remind you: Linux is very much not a closed ecosystem.
... and hence, your "free market economy of bugs" that in essence
strongly suggests users to do bisections when they find bugs in
networking, works exactly the way you did not intend it to work: it
pushes users towards other OSs.
It pushes them towards Solaris, FreeBSD, MacOS and even Windows. That
happens because the barrier to getting bugs fixed is _increased_ - and
users might find it easier to participate in the ecosystem of other OSs
- instead of having to compete with "each other" for the attention of
the head honcho (you).
You have a unique position within Linux: through a decade of hard and
excellent work you have built a quasi-monopoly to all things networking
commits: if you say about something that it should go into networking it
will, if you say that it should stay out, it wont go in.
So it is fundamentally _you_ who determines the feature/fix ratio in the
networking code, and it is _you_ who determines the amount of bugs users
have to find! There's no real competition for your position - it would
take years for anyone to replace you. (and it would be a shame and a
loss - you do your job so well)
No doubt about it: bisection is very nice, it's one of the best things
that happened to Linux debuggability in the past 2 years, i use it
heavily myself, but please do _not_ require it from testers and users.
They dont have nice 32-way Niagara's to build a kernel in 1 minute. They
dont have nice virtualization to do easy bisection. Take bisection as an
additional gift/tool but dont make it a semi-required aspect of your
subsystem. Pretty please.
And _PLEASE_ realize that the networking bug-count has been created
primarily by _you_, because it is you who throttles the amount of new
code in new kernel releases. If you cannot cope with the resulting
bug-count via your network of users - it might be perhaps because you
let too much new stuff in to begin with?
Ingo
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