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Re: To Steering Committee: RFC for patch revert policy (PR48403, bootstrap broken on many targets)


On 04/05/2011 08:26 AM, Steven Bosscher wrote:
> I don't understand, really, why it's such a big deal to revert a patch
> quickly if it broke something.

To answer this as well, firstly a proposal that comes with a request to
revert the wrong patch discredits itself.

Breaking stuff by accident is a fact of life with gcc. You have to give
people the chance to investigate and understand the problems. Since I
know what it's like to break things by accident, I don't like to shout
and complain at others when it happens to them, especially since it's
never been more than an inconvenience for me if a particular revision of
trunk was broken. I just use an earlier one, or revert the problematic
patch.

We're in stage 1, and this isn't primarily about keeping the autotesters
happy. If that was our goal we'd stay in stage 4.

> You feel mobbed and I'm sorry you feel that
> way, but it shows that a lot of people tried to work on GCC in that
> weekend.

Actually, this happened _after_ I checked in the fix for the bootstrap
issue (well, HJ checked it in without waiting for the test results).
When the tree was working again, you, HJ and bkoz decided that my
patches needed to be reverted, based on no actual facts whatsoever. This
demonstrates that we need to be careful, and that the decision to revert
something cannot be left to the whims of random people.

Once I managed to reproduce the problem I gave an ETA for the fix. After
that (on Sunday and early Monday) there was little activity on the bug.
No one asked me to revert anything until _after_ the problem was fixed.


Bernd


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