Re: [Ksummit-discuss] [MAINTAINERS SUMMIT] & [TECH TOPIC] Improve regression tracking

On Wed, Jul 5, 2017 at 9:48 AM, Guenter Roeck [off-list ref] wrote:

On 07/05/2017 08:27 AM, Steven Rostedt wrote:

quoted

On Wed, 5 Jul 2017 08:16:33 -0700
Guenter Roeck [off-list ref] wrote:

[ ... ]

quoted

quoted

If we start shaming people for not providing unit tests, all we'll
accomplish is
that people will stop providing bug fixes.

I need to be clearer on this. What I meant was, if there's a bug
where someone has a test that easily reproduces the bug, then if
there's not a test added to selftests for said bug, then we should
shame those into doing so.

I don't think that public shaming of kernel developers is going to work
any better than public shaming of children or teenagers.

Maybe a friendlier approach would be more useful ?

If a test to reproduce a problem exists, it might be more beneficial to
suggest
to the patch submitter that it would be great if that test would be
submitted
as unit test instead of shaming that person for not doing so. Acknowledging
and
praising kselftest submissions might help more than shaming for
non-submissions.

quoted

A bug that is found by inspection or hard to reproduce test cases are
not applicable, as they don't have tests that can show a regression.

My concern would be that once the shaming starts, it won't stop.

Agreed, this shouldn't be a new burden for maintainers, this should be
a contribution path for new kernel developers. Go beyond our standard
"fix a bug" advice, which is a great advice, and also recommend
"backstop a regression with a unit test".