On Tue, Apr 10, 2018 at 03:22:57PM -0400, David Miller wrote:
From: Sasha Levin Alexander.Levin@microsoft.com Date: Tue, 10 Apr 2018 19:08:20 +0000
The bot tries to take the "dumb" part out of your way, by letting you know from the start which trees this applied/built on and what dependencies it might have. It comes for free, why not use it?
I do this already while I'm processing the -stable queue in patchwork and it automatically falls right out of the process I use to extract patches out of Linus's GIT tree.
I manually pull the commit out of Linus's tree, verify that it is actually the commit I'm interested in, then I do two things:
- I look at the exact tag that the commit landed in using
"git describe --contains SHA1_ID"
- I look at the exact tag that the commit the Fixes: tag
points at landed using "git describe --contains SHA1_ID"
I double check #2 to see for cases whether the Fixes: tag itself was backported to stable trees.
I use these two tag values to organize the -stable queue into subdirectories. This guides my patch applying in order to minimize useless work.
So I have to do all of this work anyways.
Even if the bot provided these values, I would still double check them, every single one of them.
Therefore, the net result from my perspective is that for most patches fixing bugs on this list, instead of N list postings, there will now be at least N * 2.
Gotcha. I can keep it out from the regular patch flow. How could we address commits that might have been missed? Let's say I look at commits that are older than ~1 month, how can I get those looked at again?
Bots are starting to overwhelm actual content from human beings on this list, and I want to put my foot on the brake right now before it gets even more out of control.
I think we're just hitting the limitations of using a mailing list. Bots aren't around to spam everyone for fun, right?
0day bot is spammy because patches fail to compile, syzbot is spammy because we have tons of bugs users can hit and the stable bot is spammy because we miss lots of commits that should be in stable.
As the kernel grows, not only the codebase is expanding but also the tooling around it. While spammy, bots provide valuable input that in the past would take blood, sweat and tears to acquire. We just need a better way to consume it rather than blocking off these inputs.
Thanks!