Should patchtest warn on Upstream-Status: Pending ?

Should patchtest warn on Upstream-Status: Pending ?

[Adrian Bunk]

I am wondering whether patchtest should send warning emails on
   Upstream-Status: Pending

In practice patches are usually forwarded upstream either at submission 
or never.[1]

Not upstreamed OE-only patches create a technical debt that often makes 
recipe upgrades a pain.

cu
Adrian

[1] When upstream requires copyright assignment upstreaming
    later is sometimes not even legally possible.

Re: Should patchtest warn on Upstream-Status: Pending ?

[Alexander Kanavin]

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I used to have similar ideas, but... there is already too few people doing
the recipe upgrade work. I would not want to reduce that number even
further by adding more barriers and requirements. It's always possible for
a human reviewer to ask to send the patch upstream, if it's likely to cause
upgrade headaches.

There have been situations where people do upstream patches later than they
are added to oe-core; I've upstreamed parallel rpm work, and gobject
introspection cross compile support that way. Those are significant
features, and it's best to thoroughly test and refine them first before
going upstream.

As for updates, I am regularly able to remove 'Pending' patches during
upgrades; this means they did make it to upstream one way or another, or
upstream fixed the issue independently, or the code was refactored and the
whole issue is moot.

Otherwise, if I am seeing a 'Pending' patch during upgrades and it cannot
be trivially rebased, tested or even understood, and dropping the patch
does not create build failures and passes the AB tests, to me that is good
enough to simply drop the patch. If people add complex, invasive patches
and don't bother to upstream them, then there is a good chance they will be
removed some time down the road. This kind of removal happens, but very
infrequently.

There have also been situations where recipes accumulated so much cruft
over the years (not just a pile of patches) that upgrades that preserve
existing recipe become nigh-impossible; in that case I re-write the whole
mess from scratch (e.g. perl, python3, rpm, webkit).

I don't think the pending patches are a particularly bad problem; also,
their number has declined since last year.

Alex

On Sun, 15 Dec 2019 at 19:38, Adrian Bunk <bunk@stusta.de> wrote:

> I am wondering whether patchtest should send warning emails on
>    Upstream-Status: Pending
>
> In practice patches are usually forwarded upstream either at submission
> or never.[1]
>
> Not upstreamed OE-only patches create a technical debt that often makes
> recipe upgrades a pain.
>
> cu
> Adrian
>
> [1] When upstream requires copyright assignment upstreaming
>     later is sometimes not even legally possible.
> --
> _______________________________________________
> Openembedded-core mailing list
> Openembedded-core@lists.openembedded.org
> http://lists.openembedded.org/mailman/listinfo/openembedded-core
>

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Re: Should patchtest warn on Upstream-Status: Pending ?

[Ross Burton]

On 15/12/2019 18:37, Adrian Bunk wrote:
> I am wondering whether patchtest should send warning emails on
>     Upstream-Status: Pending
> 
> In practice patches are usually forwarded upstream either at submission
> or never.[1]
> 
> Not upstreamed OE-only patches create a technical debt that often makes
> recipe upgrades a pain.

I tend to agree with Alex.  In review if I see a patch that clearly 
should be something else (submit this trivial fix upstream now please, 
or mark as inappropriate) I'll do that, but otheriwse we don't want 
*more* barriers.

Ross