On Sat, Mar 11, 2023 at 09:19:54PM +0100, Willy Tarreau wrote:
On Sat, Mar 11, 2023 at 11:46:05AM -0800, Eric Biggers wrote:
(And please note, the key word here is *confidence*. We all agree that it's never possible to be absolutely 100% sure whether a commit is appropriate for stable or not. That's a red herring.
In fact even developers themselves sometimes don't know, and even when they know, sometimes they know after committing it. Many times we've found that a bug was accidently resolved by a small change. Just for this it's important to support a post-merge analysis.
And I would assume, or at least hope, that the neural network thing being used for AUTOSEL outputs a confidence rating and not just a yes/no answer. If it actually just outputs yes/no, well how is anyone supposed to know that and fix that, given that it does not seem to be an open source project?)
Honestly I don't know. I ran a few experiments with natural language processors such as GPT-3 on commit messages which contained human-readable instructions, and asking "what am I expected to do with these patches", and seeing the bot respond "you should backport them to this version, change this and that in that version, and preliminary take that patch". It summarized extremely well the instructions delivered by the developer, which is awesome, but was not able to provide any form of confidence level. I don't know what Sasha uses but wouldn't be surprised it shares some such mechanisms and that it might not always be easy to get such a confidence level. But I could be wrong.
It's actually pretty stupid: it uses the existence of ~10k of the most common words in commit messages + metrics from cqmetrics (github.com/dspinellis/cqmetrics) as input.
Although I get a score, which is already set pretty high, confidence is really non-existant here: at the end it depends mostly on the writing style of said commit author more than anything.