[libvirt] Availability of patchchecker

Daniel Veillard veillard at redhat.com
Thu Jun 9 13:20:19 UTC 2011


  As some may have noticed, I'm often behind on patch review and it
happens I notice patches way too late i.e. just before a release.
For some time I though that having something automatic to remind
me about unreviewed/unapplied patches would be a good way to fight
this. I know that Eric, Matthias, Dan ... scans mostly everything
but well are all getting quite busy and sometime things get forgotten
and that's bad for the person who spent time on it and it's bad for
the community. Asking to resend old patches tend to inflate the problem
it's not a solution and humanly it's poor taste.

  So I spent most part of the week writing patchchecker, it's an
automated tool, working out of the public mail archives and a git
checkout, and was tested only with libvirt but should work also with
other projects using MHonarc for mail archives and git (or could be
made more flexible, yadda yadda ...)

  http://www.libvirt.org/git/?p=patchchecker.git
  git clone git://libvirt.org/patchchecker.git

Check the README, there is an indexer to run regulary to extract from
the mail archives, and a command to try to show intereting things,
right now it reports only patches which didn't get any comments or
acks. It detects patchset but doesn't fully use them yet. It's crude
but it's automatic !

Next step is to so a bit of XML output and XSLT to export the output
as a web page on libvirt.org , I will also need to add support for
patch versioning i.e. being able to obsolete an older version with
a newer mail (or patch set).

I guess discussion and patches should be held and sent to this list,
which already raises a limitation of this tool: it currently support
only one git checkout, and if you send a patch for it it will complain
if it doesn't get applied after being ACK'ed :-)

BTW one of the results is that we should try to use the formal ACK
keyword all the time (capital) when accepting and commiting a patch and
I may occasionally send reply mail to threads with ACK or something
like COMMITED if the algorithm of the checker get stuck on one patch.
I really expect the amount of manual intervention to be limited to this
I want the tool to help me, not give me/us more work :-)

  Hopefully it may prove useful to a few of us, and possibly be
adapted to other projects (as usual I take patches :-)

Daniel

-- 
Daniel Veillard      | libxml Gnome XML XSLT toolkit  http://xmlsoft.org/
daniel at veillard.com  | Rpmfind RPM search engine http://rpmfind.net/
http://veillard.com/ | virtualization library  http://libvirt.org/




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