"H. Peter Anvin" <hpa@xxxxxxxxx> writes: > On February 23, 2016 12:35:12 PM PST, Junio C Hamano <gitster@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: >>ebiederm@xxxxxxxxxxxx (Eric W. Biederman) writes: >> >>> Junio C Hamano <gitster@xxxxxxxxx> writes: >>> >>>> It is valuable for a testing organization to say "We tested this >>>> series on top of version X. We know it works, we have tested on a >>>> lot more hardware than the original developer had, we know this is >>>> good to go." It is a valuable service. >>>> >>>> But that is valuable only if version X is still relevant, isn't it? >>>> >>>> Is the relevance of a version something that is decided by a >>>> developer who submits a patch series, or is it more of an attribute >>>> of the project and where the current integration is happening? >>>> Judging from the responses from Dan to this thread, I think the >>>> answer is the latter, and for the purpose of identifying the >>>> relevant version(s), the project does not even care about the exact >>>> commit, but it wants to know more about which branch the series is >>>> targetted to. >>>> >>>> With that understanding, I find it hard to believe that it buys the >>>> project much for the "base" commit to be recorded in a patch series >>>> and automated testing is done by applying the patches to that exact >>>> commit, which possibly is no-longer-relevant, even though it may >>>> help shielding the testing machinery from "you tested with a wrong >>>> version" complaints. >>>> >>>> Isn't it more valuable for the test robot to say "this may or may >>>> not have worked well with whatever old version the patch series was >>>> based on, but it no longer is useful to the current tip of the >>>> 'master'"? If you consider what benefit the project would gain by >>>> having such a robot, that is the conclusion I have to draw. >>>> >>>> So I still am not convinced that this "record base commit" is a >>>> useful thing to do. >>> >>> So I don't know what value this has to the git project. >> >>Oh, don't worry, I wasn't talking about value this may have to the >>Git project at all. "The value to the project" I mentioned in my >>response was all about the value to the kernel project. >> >>> The value of Fengguag's automated testing to the kernel project is to >>> smoke out really stupid things. >> >>I'll snip your bullet points, but as I wrote, I do understand the >>value of prescreening test. >> >>What I was questioning was what value it gives to that testing to >>use "the developer based this patch on this exact commit" added to >>each incoming patch, and have Fengguag's testing machinery test a >>patch with a base version that may no longer be relevant in the >>context of the project. Compared to that, wouldn't "this no longer >>applies to the branch the series targets" or "this still applies >>cleanly, but no longer compiles because the surrounding API has >>changed" be much more valuable? >> >>In your other message, you mentioned the "index $old..$new" lines, >>and it is possible to use them to find a tree that the patch cleanly >>applies to, but it will not uniquely identify _the_ version the >>patch submitter used. IMHO, finding such _a_ tree from the recent >>history of the branch that the patch targets and testing the patch >>on top of that tree (as opposed to testing the patch in the exact >>context the developer worked on) would give the project a better >>value. > > Personally, as a maintainer, I would love to see the tree ID and > ideally also the commit ID a series is based on. The commit ID is in > some ways less useful since it is non-recreatable (and therefore will > never match for anything but the first patch of a series), but could > be useful to the maintainer. > > As far as putting in a bunch of metainformation that has to be > manually or semimanually obtained, there are a lot of issues with > that, as it way too easily turns into wrong information or potential > information leaks that might make corporate contributors > uncomfortable. I would really love to hear from Fengguag about where this is a practical problem, but I expect the flock of x86 topic tress is probably one of those cases where there are problems for automation to figure out which tree a patch applies to in practice. The mailing list for x86 patches is linux-kernel. Even if you filter by x86@xxxxxxxxxx to detect it is an x86 patch which topic branch a patch goes to was not clear to me from a quick skim of recent lkml x86 patches. So I could really respect a patch header line that said: tree abcdef0123456789...0123456789abcdef Where the numbers where the truncated tree hash before and after a patch was applied. That would seem to give a little bit of extra sanity checking in the application of git diffs as well. Eric -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe git" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html