linux-kernel - Re: stable? quality assurance?

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Date:	Mon, 12 Jul 2010 10:57:33 -0400
From:	Valdis.Kletnieks@...edu
To:	Alexey Dobriyan <adobriyan@...il.com>
Cc:	Marcin Letyns <mletyns@...il.com>, linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org
Subject: Re: stable? quality assurance?

On Mon, 12 Jul 2010 15:42:32 +0300, Alexey Dobriyan said:
> On Mon, Jul 12, 2010 at 3:35 PM, Marcin Letyns <mletyns@...il.com> wrote:
> > Last time I tried freebsd it wasn't stable. It had problems with my hard
> > drive controler.
> 
> This thread needs more anecdotal evidence.

To be fair, the continual re-appearance of this thread is *always* anecdotal.

It's always somebody who has trouble getting it to work on *their* hardware, or
with *their* software, and insisting that stuff doesn't get shipped unless it
works properly on everything.  Apparently, having it work on 99.997% of the
gear out there isn't good enough for them.  Then there's the inevitable call
for "no shipping with blocker bugs" - never with a good objective definition of
what constitutes a "blocker" bug.

Ted had it right - you insist on fixing *everything*, you end up with
Debian Obsolete.  It's the nature of the beast - you *will* detect regressions
at something resembling an exponential-decay curve. The only question that remains is
how close to zero it has to decay before the ship date - and there's no single
answer for that which fits everybody.  One point to note is that if you ship
earlier, the decay rate increases because of wider deployment.  As a result,
it's quite probable that you get to some objective level of "stable" faster
by releasing early and then releasing a half-dozen dot releases, instead of
waiting for the 3 or 4 dozen people testing it before release to shake out all
the bugs (which obviously won't happen due to things like access to hardware).

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