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

[Simon Glass]

Hi Gerlando,

On Wed, Apr 4, 2012 at 3:35 AM, Gerlando Falauto
<gerlando.falauto at keymile.com> wrote:
> 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.

Yes I wrote it when I had to do a few revisions of a relatively small
series. It was very difficult and time-consuming to get everything
right for submission. Now it is mostly automatic.

>
> 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.

Yes, the only thing that would need to be sorted out is the hooks for
checkpatch.

>
> 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.

Yes I think that is useful, and it fits with the idea of not needed
any args in the normal case. I will stick it on the list.

>
> 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.

You can put it in any commit, and in principle in its own commit, but
'git rebase -i' doesn't like empty commits in my experience.

> 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?

Easy to do - I wonder if it might be better to commit that file to a
separate commit (which is marked Series-exclude:). Otherwise you have
a dangling file that might hang around for weeks and is very
vulnerable to accidents.

> Thanks again for the tool!

Thanks for looking at it. We will see if this goes into U-Boot this time.

Regards,
Simon

>
> 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:
>>
> [...]