[Piglit] Weekly 10 Picks from Patchwork for review and friendly reminder to clean out your old patches

[Jose Fonseca]

On 19/06/15 20:45, Ilia Mirkin wrote:
> On Fri, Jun 19, 2015 at 3:39 PM, Jose Fonseca <jfonseca at vmware.com> wrote:
>> On 19/06/15 13:32, Timothy Arceri wrote:
>>>
>>> Hi all,
>>>
>>> Unfortunately since its introduction patchwork hasn't seen a lot of love
>>> in the Piglit and Mesa projects so I thought I'd try something out to
>>> bring it out of the shadows and into the limelight.
>>>
>>> The idea is simple we have many useful but long forgotten patches
>>> sitting on the mailing list that would serve us much better sitting in
>>> the git repo, so once a week I (or anyone else that wants to help out)
>>> would pick 10 seemingly random older patches that could do with a
>>> review/update/etc.
>>>
>>> I'm hoping this will help with both clearing out the backlog of patches
>>> and getting people thinking about patchwork.
>>>
>>> I'm interested in feedback on what people think about this idea.
>>
>>
>> Patchwork seems to fail to recognize submited patches.  Eg. one of my
>> patches is https://patchwork.freedesktop.org/patch/51379/ but it has been
>> commited on
>> http://cgit.freedesktop.org/piglit/commit/?id=540972b46e51ee1d4acbb3757b731a066e2b6ba5
>>
>> Why is that?
>
> It's very strict about matching patches. The diff has to be identical.
> Which it often isn't if you made minor changes, or rebased, or
> whatever.

Without a bit of fuzzy matching I'm afraid this looks a bit hopeless to me:

I believe the bulk of the patches are committed, and only a few is 
forgotten.  Looking at the patchwork backlog it's fair to say a large 
portion of those committed don't get detected due to small changes.  So 
the end result is that developers have to click through and babysit the 
bulk of their changes in patchwork, so that the few truly forgotten 
patches get to stand out?

I don't think this will ever going to work.  There's no incentive in the 
system for the most prolific developers to spend so much of their time, 
for the sake of the occasional contributor.  The patchwork system seems 
bound to echo what happens on the mailing list: their patches get to be 
lost twice...


There 's another concern -- one can only change the status of our own 
patches.  So if one commits on behalf of somebody else, and that patch 
doesn't get recognized, one needs to get that other person to register 
and click through patchwork?





I wonder if it wouldn't be better to have a more comprehensive solution 
for review and tracking, ala github pull requests.   Maybe have an 
official mirror for mesa/piglit in github, or deploy gitlab 
(https://about.gitlab.com/features/) in fdo.org, or something along 
those lines, and start tracking this sort of things as pull requests.

I known it might look (and be) a wild idea at the moment, but I believe 
this will be the future eventually: with things like cloud-based CI 
systems (Travis CI, AppVeyor), projects can have testsuites run 
automatically on pull requests (No GPU HW available, but one can still 
ensure builds don't fail, run unit tests, and even rendering tests with 
SW renderers) and detect issues even before reviewing or committing.

I've seen this happen first-handed: I once make a pull request to an 
open-source project I had never contributed on github, a few minutes 
later bot added a comment saying that the project built fine and all 
unit tests passed, and all the maintainer had to do was clicking a button.

I'm now trying to repro this on some of my open source projects. (E.g, 
Apitrace). I still have a long way to go, but already it is showing 
fruits -- I immediately know when a Linux developr proposes a Apitrace 
change that breaks Windows vuild (or a Windows developer breaks Linux 
build) , and I can point them to the logs and they can often fix them 
selves.  I hope one day I have unit tests and more there too.


Jose