On Tue, Nov 13, 2007 at 12:50:08PM -0500, Mark Lord wrote:
Ingo Molnar wrote:
for example git-bisect was godsent. I remember that years ago bisection of a bug was a very laborous task so that it was only used as a final, last-ditch approach for really nasty bugs. Today we can autonomouly bisect build bugs via a simple shell command around "git-bisect run", without any human interaction! This freed up testing resources
..
It's only a godsend for the few people who happen to be kernel developers
It's also godsend for users who want a regression they observe fixed.
If you can tell which patch broke it you often turned a very hard to debug problem into a relatively easy fixable problem.
As an example, [1] was an issue a normal user could discover, and bisecting made the difference between "nearly undebuggable" and "easily fixable by revertng a commit".
and who happen to already use git.
As already said in thread, the required instructions for bisecting are relatively short and simple (assuming the user can build his own kernels).
It's a 540MByte download over a slow link for everyone else.
Not everyone has a slow connection.
For me, the speed of cloning a tree from git.kernel.org is completely cpu bound and limited by the speed of the 1.8 Ghz Athlon in my computer...
But if there is a real life problem like people with extremely slow and expensive internet connections not being able to bisect bugs these problems should be named and fixed (e.g. by sending CDs).
-ml
cu Adrian
[1] http://lkml.org/lkml/2007/11/12/154