Re: [PATCH v3 0/3] automatically skip away from broken commits

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Jun 10, 2009, 21:17 UTC
Message-ID: <7vtz2nlrfs.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org>
In-Reply-To: <c07716ae0906101237o5038fc4dle9f11b6f2216652a@mail.gmail.com>

Christian Couder <christian.couder@gmail.com> writes:

Show 9 quoted lines

> 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.