[U-Boot] [PATCH v4] Add 'patman' patch generation, checking and submission script

[Gerlando Falauto]

Hi Simon,

OK I haven't tried it yet, but this sounds awesome.
I wonder how people manage to send and rework their patches without such 
tool. Even one single patchset has been giving me strong enough 
headaches so far, not to mention the massive waste of time.

I pretty much agree with Albert, this should eventually move out of 
u-boot. But you need to start somewhere, and this is perhaps a good 
testbed to get people to use it. I believe it should perhaps eventually 
be integrated into git as it makes for a wonderful enhancement (or 
wrapper) over git format-patch and git send-email.

As I said I haven't tested it yet, but I would like to contribute a 
couple questions / suggestions for enhancements out of your README:

1) Marking the test setup commits using tags as well. Something like

  Series-exclude: true

I mean, I tend to forget (and make mistakes) pretty easily. Not having 
to remember that a given commit is for testing only makes it more 
difficult for me to go wrong. Even that extra "-s1" I could easily 
miss... Also, it *might* be also useful to have those test commits 
somewhere in the middle of the patch series, perhaps.

2) Do you think it would be possible to write the cover letter on a 
commit of its own? I believe git doesn't allow you to create a commit 
not touching any file, but perhaps one might find some way arount it as 
well.
Maybe the cover letter itself could be written as an added file to such 
commit, and then tagged with something like:

  Cover-letter-file: wonderfulpatchset.txt

This might turn out useful, as one could easily edit the file while 
reworking the patchset from the top commit, and then attribute it to 
such commit, wherever it is located in the tree.

What do you think?
Thanks again for the tool!

Gerlando

On 01/15/2012 02:12 AM, Simon Glass wrote:
 > What is this?
 > =============
 >
 > This tool is a Python script which:
 > - Creates patch directly from your branch
 > - Cleans them up by removing unwanted tags
 > - Inserts a cover letter with change lists
 > - Runs the patches through checkpatch.pl and its own checks
 > - Optionally emails them out to selected people
 >
 > It is intended to automate patch creation and make it a less
 > error-prone process. It is useful for U-Boot and Linux work so far,
 > since it uses the checkpatch.pl script.
 >
 > It is configured almost entirely by tags it finds in your commits.
 > This means that you can work on a number of different branches at
 > once, and keep the settings with each branch rather than having to
 > git format-patch, git send-email, etc. with the correct parameters
 > each time. So for example if you put:
 >
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