Linux and the 'clssic' computing world

[Mike Katz]

One major issue with any patch or code change is regression testing.  
Any given change may fix a particular issue but what are the 
ramifications for the entire system across all circumstances.

Though a change or fix may seem simple to integrate, the time is takes 
to fully vet that fix could take weeks depending on the system.




On 10/27/2021 8:02 AM, Sijmen J. Mulder via cctalk wrote:
> Peter Corlett via cctalk <cctalk at classiccmp.org>:
>> On Mon, Oct 25, 2021 at 10:18:51AM +0200, Sijmen J. Mulder via cctalk wrote:
>> [...]
>>> It's especially frustrating when, after having put in the work, projects
>>> refuse even trivial patches for Solaris and derrivatives or sometimes even
>>> BSDs because 'who uses that anyway'. (I include the patches in pkgsrc
>>> instead.)
>> [...]
>>
>> Anyway, this hypothetical patch submitter has apparently put in minimal
>> effort ("trivial patches")
> 'Even' trivial patches, not only trivial patches. I can understand
> rejecting something that will take real effort to review and merge.
>
>> and now implicitly expects the project maintainer
>> to integrate it immediately, and then do the thankless task of maintaining
>> and testing it indefinitely on (multiple releases of) a closed-source
>> platform which is actively hostile to their work. For free, presumably.
> This is a rather harsh take on someone submitting a shell compatibility
> fix, or a linker flag, or an autoconf check, etc. No one is asking for
> 'immediate' or 'indefinite' anything. It's perfectly fine to accept
> compatibility patches and not commit to officially support that
> platform.