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Linus Torvalds Tells Kernel Devs To Fix Their Regressive Fixing

posted by janrinok on Monday June 25 2018, @08:14PM   Printer-friendly
from the just-fix-fixes dept.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Linus Torvalds has given the Linux kernel development community a bit of a touch-up, after finding some contributions to Linux 4.18 complicated the kernel development process.

In his post announcing release candidate 2 of Linux kernel 4.18, Torvalds mentioned “some noticeable filesystem updates, particularly to cifs.”

“I'm going to point those out, because some of them probably shouldn't have been in rc2. They were ‘fixes’ not in the ‘regressions’ sense, but in the ‘missing features’ sense.”

Torvalds’ beef is that people have been adding new stuff to the kernel in release candidates and calling it a fix.

“So please, people, the ‘fixes’ during the rc series really should be things that are _regressions_. If it used to work, and it no longer does, then fixing that is a good and proper fix. Or if something oopses or has a security implication, then the fix for that is a real fix.”

“But if it's something that has never worked, even if it ‘fixes’ some behavior, then it's new development, and that should come in during the merge window. Just because you think it's a ‘fix’ doesn't mean that it really is one, at least in the ‘during the rc series’ sense.”

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  • (Score: 2) by ese002 on Tuesday June 26 2018, @12:30AM (2 children)

    by ese002 (5306) on Tuesday June 26 2018, @12:30AM (#698473)

    I wonder how much of this is a case of bugs reporting after the code base has moved on, adding new features along the way. Perhaps the newer code already fixes the bug and the developers don't want to spend the time backporting to an older release.

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  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by HiThere on Tuesday June 26 2018, @12:40AM

    by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday June 26 2018, @12:40AM (#698484) Journal

    That, however, is not a valid excuse. A fix is to repair something broken in the given version. And you want to keep that code minimal to reduce the risk of new problems.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 26 2018, @08:20AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 26 2018, @08:20AM (#698654)

    Linus' branch is the development branch.

    And even better, in a previous such mail, he told people off for pushing their bleeding edge features to the stable branch first to have an excuse for needing them "forward-ported" into the development branch as fixes rather than waiting for the merge window.

    For those who don't know, Linus' workflow is merge new features -> fix bugs -> release candidates -> release -> merge new fixes...