Re: Worrisome bug trend

From: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Date: Feb 27, 2007, 16:00 UTC
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.64.0702270751260.12485@woody.linux-foundation.org>
In-Reply-To: <7vodnfg4sy.fsf@assigned-by-dhcp.cox.net>

On Tue, 27 Feb 2007, Junio C Hamano wrote:

Show 5 quoted lines

> 
> I take that as a sign that git hasn't been exercised well and
> yet more ancient bugs are sleeping, waiting to be triggered, not
> as a sign that we are very careful and adding only small number
> of risky new code in the releases.

I'd say that it's good news. I'd be a lot more worried if there is a big rash of *new* bugs being introduced, rather than small and subtle *old* bugs being fixed.

There were a number of "December, 2006" bugs there, and I'd worry more about those. The old bugs were all fairly obscure (face it, nobody actually uses SCM's to track symlinks, because symlinks are not historically tracked by most SCM's).

And the _really_ old bugs (eg the mailinfo one) were either features that you'd never use on Unix anyway (trust_executable_bit) and thus haven't gotten any testing, or were about over-long buffers that mostly wouldn't realistically trigger in practice (ie lack of coverage).

Finding bugs is good. Some of it may well be due to just having more users. And much of it is probably because everybody has bugs - but absolutely none of the bugs on that list looked even remotely like a "we'd screw up the repository". They were all pretty much harmless details.

		Linus