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Date:      Mon, 24 Jul 2006 13:39:59 -0400
From:      John Baldwin <jhb@freebsd.org>
To:        obrien@freebsd.org
Cc:        cvs-src@freebsd.org, src-committers@freebsd.org, cvs-all@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: cvs commit: src/share/mk bsd.cpu.mk
Message-ID:  <200607241340.00106.jhb@freebsd.org>
In-Reply-To: <20060722002533.GA15356@dragon.NUXI.org>
References:  <44C012D1.2050905@cs.rice.edu> <20060721.081453.1586000351.imp@bsdimp.com> <20060722002533.GA15356@dragon.NUXI.org>

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On Friday 21 July 2006 20:25, David O'Brien wrote:
> On Fri, Jul 21, 2006 at 08:14:53AM -0600, M. Warner Losh wrote:
> > : I'd like to ask when we'll get ARM resources in the FreeBSD.org cluster
> > : so committers can have access to ARM - I don't.  So it is hard to test
> > : anything.  Until a month ago no one would agree on a reference platform
> > : so toolchain work could be tested vs.  spending all my time trying to 
get
> > : something working that no one else had.  I am still waiting to get the
> > : ARM board I purchased in my hands and working.
> > 
> > We've tested these patches.  They work.  Why must you be so insistant
> > on a proceedure that makes it so hard to get things done.
> 
> As I wrote to you before, I will not commit anything to GCC/Binutils/GDB
> that I have not (and cannot) test myself.  Would you accept a large patch
> from me and commit it to the FreeBSD kernel without you being able to
> build and test it?  I dare say you wouldn't.

Erm, I think this argument is actually not valid.  Committers commit patches 
submitted by other people or patches they haven't directly tested all the 
time.  I do this a lot when fixing problems for people where I come up with a 
patch and ask them to test it, and if they say it works ok I commit it.  I 
don't try to reproduce every single bug people report to locally test 
patches.  For many of them I simply don't have the necessary hardware and/or 
environment!  Instead of pulling a response of "well, since I can't reproduce 
it I'll just ignore it" I work to resolve the problem and trust other people 
when they say "yes, this works".  I've committed patches from PRs where I've 
eyeballed the patch and the submitter (and possibly other people) have 
reported it works.

In addition, in this case, you aren't getting a patch from some random PR 
submitter you don't know from Adam.  You are getting the patches from Warner, 
cognet@, etc. who you _know_ and should have enough of an established 
relationship now to at least be able to guage their technical competence.  
You may not realize it, but because of that, your refusal to just eyeball the 
patches for a sanity check and then get them into the tree gives the 
impression that you consider their competence level with the toolchain stuff 
to be very low, and I doubt seriously that you actually think that. :)

-- 
John Baldwin



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