Re: [RFC PATCH v4 00/10] Fix various issues around removal of untracked files/directories

From: Elijah Newren <newren@gmail.com>
Date: Oct 5, 2021, 07:40 UTC
Message-ID: <CABPp-BEF8=yw__r3p=spt647+tLG0UshaXq45ePEsFvv89i9Ng@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <87bl44n070.fsf@evledraar.gmail.com>

Hi Ævar,

On Mon, Oct 4, 2021 at 10:56 AM Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason <avarab@gmail.com> wrote:

Show 10 quoted lines

>
> On Mon, Oct 04 2021, Elijah Newren wrote:
>
> > So, I guess trying to distill what bugs me, I'd say: [...] I hope I'm not overreacting but
> > something feels wrong to me here.
>
> I don't think you're overreacting, and sorry again. Hopefully it helps
> somewhat that I for the "ignoring Junio [and charging ahead with this]"
> and the 2nd false claim about about heap allocation I was (believe it or
> not) just honestly mistaken instead of trying to get on your nerves.

I really wish I could take back that email. And yes, I was totally overreacting (in part due to unrelated non-git stuff going on recently). I should have waited a day, and then I'd probably realize it. I owe you an apology, Ævar. I'm very sorry.

In regards to the worst part of my email:

"""
  * At least half the series of yours I've reviewed have had
significant bugs[4][5][6] (in addition to [2] and [3]).  This would be
fine if it was complex code that had bugs we were fixing, or if we
were adding new features, but:
"""

I'm no stranger to introducing pretty bad bugs either, some caught in review (one case of repository corruption caught in a review just last week!), some making it into releases:

https://lore.kernel.org/git/YVOn3hDsb5pnxR53@coredump.intra.peff.net/ https://lore.kernel.org/git/DM6PR00MB06829EC5B85E0C5AC595004E894E9@DM6PR00MB0682.namprd00.prod.outlook.com/ https://lore.kernel.org/git/CABPp-BFWfwkYAPyySjWOMZ02_+YLf=TJ_aVMaHaizJWAsCL67g@mail.gmail.com/ https://lore.kernel.org/git/CABPp-BENB=mqfFU4FGb2OS9VDV=9VdT71HhFLZwtyxD8MpdTMQ@mail.gmail.com/ https://lore.kernel.org/git/CABPp-BEBKyE2NVfREov6k5qML5jryLjtzw=Y21EA=fHXA0PO5A@mail.gmail.com/ https://lore.kernel.org/git/CABPp-BF8eokQTVwgo80ffq3tn=NA=mPf7oymce5P4itDyZBiMg@mail.gmail.com/ https://lore.kernel.org/git/7v1uzu5a70.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org/ https://lore.kernel.org/git/CABPp-BHL4P0RxQ6OAuDSev9BXVM0uKTYD3M4JGTQvSwcBv4K0Q@mail.gmail.com/

and I could easily find more, it was pretty easy to come up with that list of bugs that still make me shudder. Touching difficult code, or code one isn't quite as familiar with is more prone to bigger problems. That doesn't mean we should avoid working on those areas, but I'm afraid my email probably served only to scare people away from doing so. Treewide refactoring is, by its nature, likely to take one into many areas of the codebase, and thus it'd be natural to expect problems that hopefully get caught in review. The fact that such treewide refactorings did have problems, was by itself not my point and not what I'd consider unusual. I was attempting to make a more nuanced point about lots of treewide refactorings in a short time period coupled with lack of understanding of motivation for some of those refactorings all combined with additional things on top, but utterly failed at anything more than coming across as a jerk. I'm sorry.

Thanks for responding to my email so diplomatically; I'm super impressed with that. And just to be clear, I respect your contributions and hold them in high esteem (prove, i18n, pcre2, faster send-email to name just a few). I think that message was unfortunately completely lost in my email, which is plenty of reason that I just shouldn't have sent it.