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Lack of Testing Threatening the Stability of Linux
sebFlyte writes "Andrew Morton, a Linux kernel maintainer, has said that he thinks that the lack 'credit or money or anything' given to those people who put in long hours testing Linux releases is going to cause serious problems further down the line. In his speech at Linux.Conf.Au he also waded into the ongoing BitKeeper debate, saying 'If you pick a good technology and the developers are insane, it's all going to come to tears.'"
...does it seem like Linus might need a vacation?
TFA states that he's starting to take as much pride in rejecting patches as he does accepting them, and with this whole BitKeeper thing, it seems to me like he might need a small break.
Of course, I'm not one to really talk, as I don't do nearly as much as he does with Linux...
Also, with regards to testing, those of us who use it daily are testing all the time. I know it's not structured QA, but still, it's a lot of testing.
Also, maybe slowing down the kernel releases a bit might help. I know that I do an emerge world on my Gentoo boxes about once a week, and it seems like there's a new kernel release every week. If there's a need for more testing, perhaps a little less time releasing and more time testing is in order.
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I thought the whole Fedora project WAS mass testing of "cutting edge technology for Linux". Have I been wasting my time submitting bugs? Most have been fixed that I submitted so far.
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I - I took the one the bus load of girls just went down.
I have this tendency to respond to serious posts with a joke, and jokes with a serious post. I tend to come at problems from angles of perception that other people do not see.
.please.
This is what the best developers do, otherwise they would simply come up with the same mediocre to bad solutions that everyone else does, no?
They do, however, have this really annoying tendency to see everything from the same "Man from Mars" perspective, not restricting themselves to viewing only code differently than most do. This can make them appear "insane" to the general populace.
In the land of the blind the one eyed man is a paranoid schizophrenic.
Insanity is percieving things not as they really are. If the majority percieve things not as they really are the man who does so will give the perception of being insane when he acts upon his perceptions, those acts being unintelligable to the majority.
And thus is born the image of the "quirky" genius. All will hail his new invention, but titter quietly about how he wears his socks, never for one minute stopping to take the obvious point of view that there just might be something of genius in the way he wears his socks, because he wears his socks differently than the majority do.
And being the same is sanity, right?
Nevermind that we innately wipe out genius in one swell foop with that attitude. It enforces a regression to the median, if it weren't for the fact that half the populace would have to progress to the median somehow, which, trust me, they just ain't gonna do. So instead of a regression to the median we get a regression the "really dumb."
Take the current fad for "Playskool" interfaces. . .
Of course, some "geniuses" really are just insane and "luck into" some discovery through their insane perception of things.
So how do you tell the difference? Well, takes one to know one I'm afraid. It would be nice if it didn't seem as if the people who end up in charge of "mental health" weren't all, themselves dimwitted morons at best, and completely, utterly crackers at worst.
They're coming to take me away, HO,HO! HEE, HEE! HA, HA!
I think it's something about the way I wear my socks.
KFG