From: Jakub Narebski Date: Tue, 09 Jun 2009 10:02:02 GMT Subject: Re: [PATCH v3 0/3] automatically skip away from broken commits Message-ID: In-Reply-To: Christian Couder writes: > On Mon, Jun 8, 2009 at 11:02 PM, Junio C Hamano wrote: >> "H. Peter Anvin" writes: >> >>> The advantage of that -- and I have to admit I don't know if it will >>> ever matter in practice -- is that using an actual PRNG: >>> >>> a) is less likely to get into pathological capture behaviors. >>> b) doesn't make people think later that there is something magic to the >>>    arbitrary chosen numbers. >> >> My gut feeling agrees with you that both are likely to be true; these are >> good points. >> >> Christian, what do you think? > > Here are some reasons why I think my algorithm might be better: > > - using HPA's formula I get on average 0.86 bits of information at > each step when alternating (against 0.72 when using a PRNG) > - I think that if the branches in the graph merge often between each > other, then on a big scale it's like when you are on the linear case > - I don't think we should try too hard to avoid pathological capture > behaviors, because I think we can't avoid them anyway in some cases, > like if the first bad commit is near many untestable commits By the way, I have asked question about best algorithm for "bisect skip" on StackOverflow[1], but didn't get (yet) any good responses... [1]: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/959324/ -- Jakub Narebski Poland ShadeHawk on #git