Re: Trunk frustration

[kenner at vlsi1 dot ultra dot nyu dot edu (Richard Kenner)]

    It's not fair to other contributors to simply commit your buggy
    patches to the trunk and expect everyone else to clean up your mess.
    It's just a way of forcing other people to do work that you couldn't
    be bothered doing and that they'd rather not do either.

Obviously in the case of major development, that's right.  But I don't
see the case we were talking about as being that major.  There are quite
a lot of resources out there for testing and I do indeed feel that it's
reasonable to distribute some of the testing load to the community at large.

Jan's patches were incremental changes and I see a value in having
available the resources of the community at large in the testing,
especially where there aren't any problems expected.  That's the
advantage of the incremental approach: you can take small steps, each
of which you are quite confident of, and you'll find out if you were
wrong.

Of course, this approach isn't reasonable, as you say, in the case a major
development that isn't suited for the incremental approach.  But if you can't
use it in doing incremental changes, you lose much of the advantages of doing
things incrementally and having a large development community.

I don't agree with the characterization of his patches as "buggy": yes, there
was one (or perhaps two) with problems on some architectures, but the vast
majority of them produced no problems at all.