Re: How to watch a mailing list & repo for patches which affect a certain area of code?

From: Stefan Beller <sbeller@google.com>
Date: Oct 10, 2016, 18:42 UTC
Message-ID: <CAGZ79kaHOBaVCsVPen-K_5LyitcDzVbjL_kAqMkYKk_fQxH4PQ@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <4B3747D8D2724E98B6AC000FE4072A09@black7>

+cc Xiaolong Ye <xiaolong.ye@intel.com>

On Sun, Oct 9, 2016 at 2:26 PM, Jason Pyeron <jpyeron@pdinc.us> wrote:

Show 23 quoted lines

>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Ian Kelling
>> Sent: Sunday, October 09, 2016 15:03
>>
>> I've got patches in various projects, and I don't have time to keep up
>> with the mailing list, but I'd like to help out with
>> maintenance of that
>> code, or the functions/files it touches. People don't cc me.
>> I figure I
>> could filter the list, test patches submitted, commits made,
>> mentions of
>> files/functions, build filters based on the code I have in
>> the repo even
>> if it's been moved or changed subsequently. I'm wondering what other
>> people have implemented already for automation around this, or general
>> thoughts. Web search is not showing me much.
>>
>
> One thought would be to apply every patch automatically (to the branches of interest?). Then trigger on the [successful] changed
> code. This would simplify the logic to working on the source only and not parsing the emails.
>
> -Jason
>

I think this is currently attempted by some kernel people. However it is very hard to tell where to apply a patch, as it is not formalized. See the series that was merged at 72ce3ff7b51c ('xy/format-patch-base'), which adds a footer to the patch, that tells you where exactly a patch ought to be applied.

The intention behind that series was to have some CI system hooked up and report failures to the mailing list as well IIUC. Maybe that helps with your use case, too?