Subject: Re: Reporting bugs and bisection (was: Re: 2.6.25-rc8: FTP transfer errors)

From: Ingo Molnar <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 14 Apr 2008 12:18:13 +0200

* Andrew Morton <[email-masked]> wrote:

> We dont' do that as much nowadays - there's a tendency to
> 
> a) throw the problem back at the reporter, often asking them to 
>    bisect. If the reporter is running a distro kernel (eg: Fedora) 
>    then that's quite hard, and often isn't a think they have knowledge 
>    to do.  So they'll just disappear.  Or
> 
> b) just ignore the report altogether.

hm, who does this - i've seen networking folks do it but does anyone 
else do it? Such cases are _clear_ abuse of users and they'll do the 
obvious thing: vote with their feet.

I only ask people to bisect it when all other avenues fail - and even 
then i try to make it clear that bisection is just something they can 
_optionally_ do to speed things up (it's never required), and that it's 
a pure opt-in.

doing _kernel_ bisection is totally hard at the moment - it disrupts the 
user way too much and causes many hours of work for most users. [ 
Requiring bisection for userspace projects might be more doable. (but 
even there's it's wrong when it's not automated completely and where a 
failure pattern is not deterministic.) ]

	Ingo