Re: [PATCH qa-frontpage] Apply incoming patches onto the correct feature branch

[Christopher Baines]

Vivien Kraus <vivien@planete-kraus.eu> writes:

> It seems that the only available information of the feature branch is
> in the patch name.
> ---
>
> Hello guix!
>
> Thank you for making the QA tool. It seems to me that feature branches
> are ignored for patches. The patches seem to always be applied on top
> of master. I get that idea because the base-for-issue-* tag is always
> put on HEAD, and all my patches targetting gnome-team recently get
> applied to master. I understand that the latter could be a problem
> with me.
>
> If patches are indeed applied on top of master, then the question
> arises, what to do. The available information from patchwork is
> scarce: the base-commit is not available, and the optional feature
> branch only appears in the name of the patches of the series.
>
> I think it is possible to parse the patch names. This way, we get some
> useful information: the feature branch, the series revision, and the
> patch index. The patch index can be used to make sure the patches are
> in correct order (this can be the case if a server in the path
> re-orders the emails).
>
> What do you think?

Hi Vivien,

Thanks for trying to implement this and sending a patch, I think it's a
good feature to add but there's a few things needed to make this work.

Firstly, you need to actually change which branch the patch is applied
to, and the place to do that is here [1] in the call to
with-git-worktree. You can probably use get-commit from
(guix-qa-frontpage git-repository) to find the commit hash for a
branch. You'll also probably need to move around some of the code in
create-branch-for-issue so that you have the data about the patches to
work out what the desired branch is before you call with-git-worktree.

1: 
https://git.cbaines.net/guix/qa-frontpage/tree/guix-qa-frontpage/manage-patch-branches.scm#n250

The second thing is that there's other places in the codebase that
assume the patches have been applied to the master branch. In
start-manage-patch-branches-thread, there's
get-changes-compared-to-master which is used to decide if a branch needs
recreating if there's too many changes between the base revision and a
recent master branch revision. That'll need changing to at least skip
over any patches been applied to a non-master branch, or perform the
comparison against the tip of the relevant branch.

The third thing that will need to change to allow this to happen is
adding clear messaging on to the issue page to indicate where patches
have been applied to non-master branches. That'll help to avoid people
merging these patches in to the master branch rather than the branch
they were intended for.

Maybe what would be helpful is a procedure in (guix-qa-frontpage issue)
that takes the data for the issue from latest-patchwork-series-by-issue,
and gives you back the branch name that the patches should be applied
to. That can then be used to get the branch information for all the
above 3 use cases.

As for trying to order the patches, do you know of a case where the
ordering from Patchwork is wrong? I think it's only worth changing the
ordering in the qa-frontpage if we know we're doing it for a reason.

There's now a create-issue-branch command to the guix-qa-frontpage
script as well, which will be a good way of testing the code out for
applying patches to various branches. It'll fail when it comes to
pushing the branch, but it'll still be useful for testing the code up to
that point.

Would you be able to look at sending some revised patches?

Thanks,

Chris

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