Hi
In our company we have our own Wireshark tools and plugins, which use the main wireshark repository. To ensure that those do not break (and if they break we can fix them in due time), we synchronize with the Wireshark repo every night and build it with our own tools on Windows and Linux.
And nearly every other week or so, the build breaks because of patches introducing issues, which would have been caught by Petri-Dish. The latest being a NFS patch (#10429), where a variable is being used uninitialized. There where many patches to NFS, and the top-most one only was being sent to petri-dish, but not rebased first, which meant it was not checking the code of it's predecessors but only the one of itself.
Now if I submit code, it correctly and rightly so must pass the Petri-Dish step to ensure cross-plattform compatibility for building at least. I have nothing against that, in fact, I really prefer it, becuase every now and then you can overlook something.
But all (I checked the last 7) the breaks in our build-system happened, because a core-developer submitted a patch without petri-dish. I do not think it is fair, that non-core-developers are being sent through an extra step and core's can circumvent this step. In my opinion it should be a necessity for everyone.
regards,
Roland