Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@xxxxxxxxx> writes: > That reminded me that it would be useful preparation to collect > descriptions of pain points we are having with our existing patch > flow. As the maintainer, I want to ensure that what I queue on 'seen' is kept reasonably up to date. Not picking up the latest every time a topic is rerolled is OK, but before declaring the topic will hit 'next' in a few days, it must be (1) the latest and (2) the greatest (meaning: what reviewers are happy with). This requires a few features from any tracking system. It must be able to: - tell which round of patches are in 'seen'. - tell which e-mail messages are the newer round than what is queued, and which ones are the latest round. - tell which patch have been commented on, and been updated in response. - tell which patch have been positively accepted with an Ack or a Reviewed-by, and if a patch in a newer round is identical to an already accepted one (in which case, reviewers would not bother to send "this step still looks good to me"). The system I use for the first two points is to rely on the list archive and the mapping from each individual commit made out of a patch on the list (implemented as git notes, that records a blob with the Message-Id for each commit [*1*]). So $ git log --notes=amlog --no-merges --oneline master..$topic would give a list of commits with the original Message-ID, and I can see which piece of e-mail each commit came from. The third and fourth are maintained mostly manual, with me keeping notes in the draft of "What's cooking" report (which I send out from time to time). Having to notice, pick up and squeeze in Acked-by's and Reviewed-by's is quite painful and cumbersome, especially for a long series, and the buggy "git rebase -x" does not help, either [*2*]. If we run a patchwork instance for our project, the first two could be largely automated. Automation built around Patchwork should be able to, or at least should be able to help me to: - notice when a new round of an existing topic is posted. - fetch the "amlog" notes, together with a copy of daily 'seen', to see if a topic that is queued has an update, and notify me and others when the topic queued is stale [*3*]. - tie a step in the latest round with a corresponding step in the previous round, and show Ack's and Reviewed-By's that are still valid [*4*]. [Footnotes] *1* "git fetch https://github.com/gitster/git +refs/notes/amlog:refs/notes/amlog" should give you a copy of this database. Then, for example you can ask where a commit came from: $ git show -s --notes=amlog format="%N%s" 61a7660516 Message-Id: <pull.1001.git.git.1618254757074.gitgitgadget@xxxxxxxxx> reftable: document an alternate cleanup method on Windows Note that this is not a one-to-one mapping. I may initially apply patches to an inappropriate base and push the integration result out that has it in 'seen', but I may realize that the series needs to be queued on a different commit and rebase the topic the next day. Both commits before and after such a rebasing have come from the single piece of e-mail, so you can say "this commit came from this message", but it is impossible to expect a single answer to "which commit is the result of this message"---there will be multiple. Strictly speaking, when two rounds of the same topic had patches that were unchanged between the iterations in their earliest parts, two pieces of e-mail may convey the same patch, so in the ideal world, it might be more useful to record "this commit came from this and that messges, both of which record an identical patch". I currently do not do so, though. *2* It would be ideal if "rebase -i -x 'add-trailer -r peff@'" can be used to stop at each commit, run the 'add-trailer -r peff@' script that amends HEAD to add "Reviewed-by: peff@", and continue, while honoring the "notes.rewriteref" configuration variable (in my repository, set to "refs/notes/amlog"). That way, I can queue with "git am", at which time "amlog" gets populated to map each commit to the original message, find Reviewed-by: and do the above rebase, while carrying the message IDs to resulting commits. Alas, "rebase -i -x" is buggy and loses the notes during this process (doing s/pick/reword/ and manually squeezing Reviewed-by: into the log message is a poor but workable workaround). cf. https://lore.kernel.org/git/xmqq8s6tcuxc.fsf@gitster.g/ *3* It is perfectly normal if a topic is left stale, if the newer iteration breaks integration. So the stale notification going directly to a contributor from an automated system would not help very much, but it needs to come with the reason why it is kept out of 'seen', which must be supplied by human, not by an automation. If an automation around Patchwork can send, instead of "hey, here is an updated series available" notification, a mbox readily usable by "git am -s3c" to me, with Acked-by's and Reviewed-by's already incorporated, that might be ideal (these trailers may have to be filtered/curated to avoid spams, though). *4* Judging a step in the latest round and the corresponding step in the previous round has not substantially changed may not be easily automatable, and carrying Ack's and Reviewed-by's forward would require human curator of the "patchwork" database.
