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

Christian Couder [off-list ref] writes:

On Mon, Jun 8, 2009 at 11:02 PM, Junio C Hamano[off-list ref] wrote:

quoted

"H. Peter Anvin" [off-list ref] writes:

quoted

The advantage of that -- and I have to admit I don't know if it will
ever matter in practice -- is that using an actual PRNG:

a) is less likely to get into pathological capture behaviors.
b) doesn't make people think later that there is something magic to the
   arbitrary chosen numbers.

My gut feeling agrees with you that both are likely to be true; these are
good points.

Christian, what do you think?

Here are some reasons why I think my algorithm might be better:

- using HPA's formula I get on average 0.86 bits of information at
each step when alternating (against 0.72 when using a PRNG)
- I think that if the branches in the graph merge often between each
other, then on a big scale it's like when you are on the linear case
- I don't think we should try too hard to avoid pathological capture
behaviors, because I think we can't avoid them anyway in some cases,
like if the first bad commit is near many untestable commits

By the way, I have asked question about best algorithm for "bisect skip"
on StackOverflow[1], but didn't get (yet) any good responses...

[1]: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/959324/

-- 
Jakub Narebski
Poland
ShadeHawk on #git