Re: Number of 3.3 hi-pri PRs going up

[Janis Johnson <janis187 at us dot ibm dot com>]

On Fri, Feb 21, 2003 at 07:02:30PM +0100, Steven Bosscher wrote:
> Op vr 21-02-2003, om 18:48 schreef Janis Johnson:
>  
> > I'll run some more regression hunts for regressions in 3.3.  This is now
> > a background task that takes just a few minutes of work for each PR,
> > plus a couple of hours of elapsed time, to identify the patch.
> 
> Just curious: What are the begin- and end points of your search?  My
> impression so far has been that many many bugs are regressions from
> 2.95, and Wolfgang's comments confirmed this.  So for such old
> regressions it's almost impossible to narrow the problem down to a
> single patch, or even a week in which it was applied.

Wolfgang and others have, for most of the PRs identified as regressions,
recorded the last release for which the test case worked.  I generally
start with the branch point for the release in which the bug first
shows up and if that's wrong I back up.  If the bug existed on the
mainline when it was reported, then I use the report date as the high
date; otherwise the date when the next release branch was created.

My scripts work just fine with a range of a couple of years.  I use a
local rsync copy of the CVS repository, and if a CVS update fails I
blow away the tree and start over.  I set my searches to go down to
five minutes, and it's actually much quicker to narrow down the range
from a couple of years to a couple of weeks than from a couple of weeks
to the actual patch.

Generally, it doesn't seem to be worthwhile to identify patches that
introduced regressions for things that last worked in 2.95; things have
just changed too much.  Sometimes a bug was introduced by a huge patch,
and in that case it also doesn't help much.  Finding the patch that
fixed a bug on the mainline doesn't always help, either, because
sometimes it was magically fixed by a huge change.

I keep meaning to clean up my scripts and post them (so far I've only
posted the one that provides the outer framework), but I'd be happy to
share them with anyone who would like to try them out.

Janis