Re: [REQ/DISCUSSION] patch managing system

[Cyril Roelandt]

On 03/21/2016 04:48 PM, Mathieu Lirzin wrote:
> To automate the repetitive tasks, Cyril Roelandt had started sometimes
> ago to work on a bot that was continuously applying and building
> incoming patches on top of master and report (by email) if things were
> building correctly.  I think that is a good idea that could be extended
> by providing a way to send commands to the bot like what is done for
> Debbugs.

Yeah, it was a fun experiment. The main issue is that reading mail is
harder than it looks. People attach patches to their mails, they send
them using git-send-email, they attach the output of "git format-patch"
to a regular mail, they have weird encodings, etc. That means there are
lots of cases to tests, and lots of potential bugs. If the "patches"
tool from QEMU does that well already, I'd be in favor of not recoding it :)

That being said, something we really need is a tool that helps us handle
trivial update patches (basically, patches that just update the version
and the hash of a given package). It should apply the patch and run a
script like this one:

$ cat check-update.sh
make || exit 1
for pkg in $(./pre-inst-env guix refresh -l $1 | sed 's/.*: //')
do
        echo "[+] Rebuilding $pkg"
        ./pre-inst-env guix build $pkg
        if [ "$?" -ne "0" ]; then
                echo "[+] Rebuilding $pkg: KO"
                exit 1
        else
                echo "[+] Rebuilding $pkg: OK"
        fi
done

I think we could have a mailing-list dedicated to these trivial update
patches. I'd also be in favor of splitting the mailing-list into many
smaller ones, such as:
- core;
- packages;
- trivial updates.

WDYT?

Cyril.