Re: [commit] Deprecate remaining STREQ uses

[mec dot gnu at mindspring dot com (Michael Elizabeth Chastain)]

Andrew Cagney writes:
> modify
> build
> test
> submit
> review
> commit

I'd like to go off on a bit of a tangent here.

When I submit a patch, I describe how I tested the patch.  I'm also
in the habit of asking people how they tested their patches when I'm
reviewing other people's patches.

I'd like this to become a mandatory part of a patch submission,
just like a ChangeLog entry is a mandatory part.

I'm not advocating for any particular minimum level of testing.
If someone says "Testing: I built gdb and it still compiled",
that is okay for some patches.  Indeed, I submitted a patch like
that for dwarfread.c this week, and a maintainer approved it.

In fact I am opposed to a high level of testing before committing
patches on the mainline.  Most patches never cause a problem.  As long
as it stays that way, it's more efficient for people to commit patches,
and then I test them in my next spin, and if there's a regression, I
isolate it pretty fast.  It's like interrupt processing on a deeply
pipelined processor, the processor gets more throughput at the cost of
more state to manage when an interrupt does happen.

The testing requirement would do two things.  First, just because it's
there, people would do some minimal amount of testing so that they don't
look lame in public.  Second, if a problem does occur with the patch,
then when somebody else is analyzing the problem, they have some idea of
how the patch was tested before it was integrated.

(When I was working on the linux kernel, frequently people would submit
patches and say "I didn't even compile this yet but here's the idea
...".  We handle this with RFC instead, so we don't have this problem.)

I dunno if gdb can handle a formal process change to do this.  We're all
pretty busy these days.  But if anybody shares my views, you can do this
yourself: say how you tested your patches, and ask people to include
this information in a patch when they review it.

Michael C