On Tue, Nov 13, 2007 at 12:50:08PM -0500, Mark Lord wrote:
quoted text
> Ingo Molnar wrote:
>>
>> for example git-bisect was godsent. I remember that years ago bisection of 
>> a bug was a very laborous task so that it was only used as a final, 
>> last-ditch approach for really nasty bugs. Today we can autonomouly bisect 
>> build bugs via a simple shell command around "git-bisect run", without any 
>> human interaction! This freed up testing resources 
> ..
>
> It's only a godsend for the few people who happen to be kernel developers

It's also godsend for users who want a regression they observe fixed.

If you can tell which patch broke it you often turned a very hard to 
debug problem into a relatively easy fixable problem.

As an example, [1] was an issue a normal user could discover, and 
bisecting made the difference between "nearly undebuggable" and
"easily fixable by revertng a commit".

quoted text
> and who happen to already use git.

As already said in thread, the required instructions for bisecting are 
relatively short and simple (assuming the user can build his own 
kernels).

quoted text
> It's a 540MByte download over a slow link for everyone else.

Not everyone has a slow connection.

For me, the speed of cloning a tree from git.kernel.org is completely 
cpu bound and limited by the speed of the 1.8 Ghz Athlon in my 
computer...

But if there is a real life problem like people with extremely slow and 
expensive internet connections not being able to bisect bugs these 
problems should be named and fixed (e.g. by sending CDs).

quoted text
> -ml

cu
Adrian

[1] http://lkml.org/lkml/2007/11/12/154

-- 

       "Is there not promise of rain?" Ling Tan asked suddenly out
        of the darkness. There had been need of rain for many days.
       "Only a promise," Lao Er said.
                                       Pearl S. Buck - Dragon Seed

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