Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id ; Tue, 27 Mar 2001 03:15:34 -0500 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id ; Tue, 27 Mar 2001 03:15:24 -0500 Received: from adsl-64-163-64-75.dsl.snfc21.pacbell.net ([64.163.64.75]:18961 "EHLO konerding.com") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id ; Tue, 27 Mar 2001 03:15:12 -0500 Message-ID: <3AC04BAC.C21E302@konerding.com> Date: Tue, 27 Mar 2001 00:13:32 -0800 From: David Konerding X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.73 [en] (Win98; U) X-Accept-Language: en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Rik van Riel CC: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Subject: Re: "mount -o loop" lockup issue In-Reply-To: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Rik van Riel wrote: > On Mon, 26 Mar 2001, David Konerding wrote: > > > It's a bug in Linux 2.4.2, fixed in later versions. > > Regression/quality control testing would have caught this, but the > > developers usually just break things and wait for people to complain > > as their "Regression" testers. > > As said before, we're interested in people willing to do regression > tests on the kernel. Unfortunately, not all that many testers have > stepped forward and not all that many artificial tests are being run. No, the point is that the linux developers should regression test their code BEFORE releasing it to the public as a version like "2.4.2". When I see a version like "2.4.2", I have an expectation that all the stupid little problems (like mounting loopback filesystem) have already been found. It's even worse that these are obvious, simple bugs (like the "NFS doesn't work over reiserfs because somebody changed the VFS layer and didn't fix any filesystems but ext2" that I reported a while ago) which would have been caught by a little testing. Now, don't even get me started on how the developers are fixing every legitimate bug found by CHECKER when they refused to put a debugger into the kernel "because a good programmer finds their bug by studying the code"-- well, obviously, you didn't find a lot of bugs by studying the code. I've been using Linux for something like 6-7 years now, quite faithfully. I've been very impressed with many of its facilities, and the improvements to the kernel (which I've compiled since 0.99) have been astounding. But the attitude that "many eyes make all bugs shallow" and "let the users test the code for us" just don't hold up. For the former, clearly, many eyes didn't find a lot of basically obvious bugs, for the latter, it's just impolite. - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/