Comment by incrudible
4 years ago
> It is wasting a lot of peoples' time.
If you run a test on your codebase and it passes, do you find that writing the test was a waste of time?
> I'm skeptical that a research paper by some nobodies from a state university will accomplish this.
It did for me.
Let's take a peek at how the people whose time is being wasted feel about it:
> This is not ok, it is wasting our time, and we will have to report this, AGAIN, to your university...
> if you have a list of these that are already in the stable trees, that would be great to have revert patches, it would save me the extra effort these mess is causing us to have to do...
> Academic research should NOT waste the time of a community.
> The huge advantage of being "community" is that we don't need to do all the above and waste our time to fill some bureaucratic forms with unclear timelines and results.
Seems they don't think it is a good use of their time, no. But I'm sure you know a lot more about kernel development and open source maintenance than they do, right?
I didn't intend to convey that the answer to my question is "no". That's the whole problem with tests: Most of the time, it's drudge work and it does feel like they're a waste of time when they never signal anything. That doesn't mean they are a waste of time.
Similarly, if a research paper shows that its hypothesis is false, the author might feel that it was a waste of time having worked on it, which can lead to publication bias.