Subject: Re: [PATCH v3 0/3] automatically skip away from broken commits

From: "H. Peter Anvin" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 15 Jun 2009 06:16:05 -0700

Christian Couder wrote:
> Yes, but I feared that there could be rounding related differences
> between platforms.

Doesn't matter for this application.  Really.  Anything you're going to
do yourself will be much worse.  Realistically, you might have a
difference in the 53rd bit.

> By the way, could you explain why power 1.5 is better than 2? It would
> be much simpler if we could avoid square rooting anything in the first
> place.

It is the power function that most closely creates a distribution which
matches the value curve (rounded to a small fraction.)

> I don't think this is a real problem for this application. In fact I
> think it's already quite overkill and there are better things to do,
> like looking for a commit on a different branch among the first ones
> in the list, if we want to improve the current behavior.
> 
> So unless there is a real flaw, I am going to work on something else.

Makes sense.

	-hpa

-- 
H. Peter Anvin, Intel Open Source Technology Center
I work for Intel.  I don't speak on their behalf.