On Wed, Apr 16, 2008 at 09:39:41PM +0200, Sverre Rabbelier wrote:

On Wed, Apr 16, 2008 at 3:26 PM, Adrian Bunk [off-list ref] wrote:
...

quoted

 E.g. if you look at commit f743d04dcfbeda7439b78802d35305781999aa11
 (ide/legacy/q40ide.c: add MODULE_LICENSE), how could you determine
 automatically that it is a bugfix, and the commit that introduced
 the bug?

Well, a dead giveaway would be:
"http://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=10124"

Which could be "There is no driver for my TV card in the kernel."

quoted

 You can always get some data, but if you want to get usable statistics
 you need explicit tags in the commits, not some algorithm that tries
 to guess.

As said above, I don't agree, you can 'guess' very reliably on a large
dataset. Also, most commits are already 'tagged' in some way or
another. The trick is to find the pattern in this tagging and use it.

I hope this clears things up a bit,

I hope you are aware of the non-technical implications if the results 
don't match reality?

E.g. I am proud that my commits do virtually never introduce bugs, so 
any results someone publishes about what I do should better be right
or my first thoughts are somewhere between "fist" and "lawyer". [1]

Cheers,

Sverre Rabbelier

cu
Adrian

[1] my actual reaction might only be an angry email, but I hope you
    get the point that wrong results can really piss off people

-- 

       "Is there not promise of rain?" Ling Tan asked suddenly out
        of the darkness. There had been need of rain for many days.
       "Only a promise," Lao Er said.
                                       Pearl S. Buck - Dragon Seed