Quotes of the week [LWN.net]

Quotes of the week

Posted Jan 20, 2015 3:32 UTC (Tue) by Baylink (guest, #755)
In reply to: Quotes of the week by dlang
Parent article: Quotes of the week

Linus:
> There may still be active users of that platform that provably cannot possibly work at all any more, but if they never upgrade the kernel, then it's still not a regression.

This won't be the first time Linus has been wrong, or that I've said so.

Regression, by its definition, means "*In a version transition of any kind, something which used to work as defined no longer does*".

It *means* that such users as he alludes to cannot upgrade safely anymore without the risk of something breaking.

The *job* of a release manager is to be able to make intelligent judgements about the relative risks of and labor to fix regressions between releases.

Test suites are *designed* to spot your regressions; that's actually why they exist.

Quotes of the week

Posted Jan 22, 2015 12:32 UTC (Thu) by FrozenGeek (guest, #96688) [Link]

If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?

Quotes of the week

Posted Jan 24, 2015 2:03 UTC (Sat) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]

If anyone can design a test suite that takes care of all cases and runs within a merge window, great. Until then, if you want to upgrade with confidence, run the rc releases on test hardware and make noises when things break. If you're silent for years then come complaining that something broke last year, you don't garner much sympathy from me at least. Sure, fixes would be accepted, but now the new behavior might be expected, so you have to deal with that too.