Re: GCC build of HEAD failed for native with your patch on2004-09-04T15:32:13Z.

[James E Wilson <wilson at specifixinc dot com>]

On Mon, 2004-09-06 at 17:19, Daniel Berlin wrote:
> I was under the distinct impression that our policy was that the person
> responsible for uncovering the latent bug is the one who is supposed to
> fix it, regardless of whether they originally caused it.
> In fact, I remember reading this numerous times on the mailing list.
> Is this incorrect?
> Can somebody please clarify?

I believe the rule is that if you add a patch that creates a problem,
then you are responsible for either reverting your patch or fixing the
bugs it created, even if they are latent.

However, I would argue that I did not add a patch.  I reverted one.  I
removed an incorrect change added by someone else 5 months ago,
restoring the exact same behaviour that existed before the incorrect
patch went in.

Also, in this case, reverting my patch reversion is not an option, as
the code really was wrong for 5 months, and we can not go back to the
broken code.

That leaves the issue of what to do about the latent problems that were
hidden by the broken change that I removed.  I would argue that it is
wrong to automatically assign responsibility for them to me, because
that would be counterproductive.  Our goal here is to get the most bugs
fixed.  But if fixing one person's mistake makes me liable for fixing N
other mistakes made by M other people in the meantime, then I would be
less likely to accept responsibility for fixing random bugs in the
future.  And that would hurt everyone.  Thus in a special case like
this, I don't think responsibility for the latent bugs should
automatically fall to me.

In the interest of getting the most bugs fixed, which is my goal here, I
did look at this problem, write a patch for it, and check it in.  I did
this as soon as I was able to, but I got stuck with two ppc problems at
the same time, I have to do ppc testing on a machine I could afford to
buy with my own money, the rules require so much testing that it took me
16 hours to get through the first one, plus the 3-day holiday weekend...
I would argue that there were unusual factors here which delayed my
fix.  Otherwise I would have been much more responsive to the initial
bootstrap bug report.
-- 
Jim Wilson, GNU Tools Support, http://www.SpecifixInc.com