Re: [PATCH v3 0/3] automatically skip away from broken commits
- From
- H. Peter Anvin <hpa@zytor.com>
- Date
- Jun 10, 2009, 22:43 UTC
- Message-ID
- <4A303723.4060805@zytor.com>
- In-Reply-To
- <7vtz2nlrfs.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org>
Junio C Hamano wrote:
Show 30 quoted lines
> Christian Couder <christian.couder@gmail.com> writes: > >> On Tue, Jun 9, 2009 at 10:37 PM, Junio C Hamano<gitster@pobox.com> wrote: >>> Christian Couder <christian.couder@gmail.com> writes: >>> >>>> My opinion is that we should not penalize all the people working on >>>> "quite clean" projects and also people working on "not clean" projects >>>> who are able to recover, on the pretence that there are other people >>>> on these "not clean" projects who are not. >> ... >> When I wrote "clean", I just mean with not too many untestable commits. > > Ok, then the "opinion" in the above paragraph was simply stating the > obvious: we should have a good "bisect skip". I obviously agree with that > ;-). > > In other words, you were not arguing against my observation that your > algorithm would not be much better than randomly picking the next commit > when the best one is untestable, unless the history is linear. I guess > that was what I was confused with. I thought you were saying that we > should give preferential treatment to people with linear history. > >> Ok. I started working on optionaly using a PRNG but I am not sure that >> you will want to add another one. > > It may still make sense to replace, not add to, that "fixed alternating > distance in goodness space" with a randomized one, for the reasons HPA > stated, especially for avoiding to give a false impression that the magic > constants are picked for some reason. >
That being said, Christian's observation that a biased selection would be better than a linear random pick is a good one.
-hpa