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Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.64.0702151059090.20368@woody.linux-foundation.org>
Date: Thu, 15 Feb 2007 11:02:32 -0800 (PST)
From: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@...ux-foundation.org>
To: Sergei Organov <osv@...ad.com>
cc: Pekka Enberg <penberg@...helsinki.fi>,
J.A. MagallÃÃÃÃón
<jamagallon@....com>, Jan Engelhardt <jengelh@...ux01.gwdg.de>,
Jeff Garzik <jeff@...zik.org>,
Linux Kernel Mailing List <linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org>,
Andrew Morton <akpm@...ux-foundation.org>
Subject: Re: somebody dropped a (warning) bomb
On Thu, 15 Feb 2007, Sergei Organov wrote:
>
> I agree that if the warning has no true positives, it sucks. The problem
> is that somehow I doubt it has none. And the reasons for the doubt are:
Why do you harp on "no true positives"?
That's a pointless thing. You can make *any* warning have "true
positives". My personal favorite is the unconditional warning:
warning: user is an idiot
and I _guarantee_ you that it has a lot of true positives.
It's the "no false negatives" angle you should look at.
THAT is what matters. The reason we don't see a lot of warnings about
idiot users is not that people don't do stupid things, but that
*sometimes* they actually don't do something stupid.
Yeah, I know, it's far-fetched, but still.
In other words, you're barking up *exactly* the wrong tree. You're looking
at it the wrong way around.
Think of it this way: in science, a theory is proven to be bad by a single
undeniable fact just showing that it's wrong.
The same is largely true of a warning. If the warning sometimes happens
for code that is perfectly fine, the warning is bad.
Linus
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