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

[Daniel Vetter]

On Fri, Jun 19, 2015 at 09:12:15PM +0100, Jose Fonseca wrote:
> 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.

We (the i915 kernel folks) are working on an improved patchwork (aiming to
push it all to upstream patchwork ofc) which should address a lot of your
concerns. It can trakc entire patch series, resends and has better
automagic detection of when a related/rebased/slightly changed patch shows
up or gets merged. Atm we're testing it internally a bit, but I hope we
can roll it out to the public soonish. Damien is the one working on it
mostly.
-Daniel
-- 
Daniel Vetter
Software Engineer, Intel Corporation
http://blog.ffwll.ch