[forum] Some perspective from the cheap seats...

[Michel Dänzer]

On Fre, 2003-03-21 at 04:10, Kendall Bennett wrote:
> "David Wexelblat" <dwex@XFree86.Org> wrote:
> 
> > - I believe we do need more committer access. Not open access, but more
> > committer access. Mostly to reduce load on the people who are currently
> > responsible. I believe this is already in progress.
> 
> On of the key issues that I see at work here, is something I brought up 
> quite a few years ago now. XFree86 desperately needs a suite of 
> conformance tests that can be used to validate that a driver module is 
> correct and the binary interfaces are functioning properly. The loadable 
> module system is a step in the right direction, but simply compiling all 
> the modules and releasing them as a single lump for every XFree86 version 
> is inviting trouble. Unless someone has a change to sit down and 
> physically test the driver modules on all 'supported' hardware, there is 
> a very good chance that things will break.
> 
> Which brings me to the point about committer access. IMHO the XFree86 BOD 
> and Core Team have nightmares about driver bugs due to this exact reason. 
> Someone needs to police changes made to device driver code to ensure 
> things are *working*, when they are comitted to the XFree86 code tree. 
> Keeping the list closed helps to maintain a reasonable amount of quality, 
> but it means things move *very* slowly. 
> 
> If XFree86 does open up access to more committers (regardless of whether 
> it is fully open or just signing up 10-20 more active committers), 
> something needs to be done to ensure that people committing the code 
> changes can verify things are correct. More importantly those tools 
> should be available to the developers actually working on the drivers, so 
> they can ensure their work is correct before sending it to the committer.

You have a fair point, but this doesn't seem an argument for committer
access either way. The current committers have broken these things in
the past, and they undoubtedly will in the future (as long as there's no
test suite or something keeping them from doing so :). Errare humanum
est.


PS: I think it's a pity that David Wexelblat's mostly very interesting
and informative post was spoilt by repeated ad hominem attacks on Keith
Packard.

-- 
Earthling Michel Dänzer (MrCooper)/ Debian GNU/Linux (powerpc) developer
XFree86 and DRI project member   /  CS student, Free Software enthusiast