Re: b4: prep --edit-cover emits strange message about "Already Ran"

[Dave Marquardt <davemarq@linux.ibm.com>]

Matthieu Baerts <matttbe@kernel.org> writes:

> On 20/03/2026 15:41, Dave Marquardt wrote:
>> I found the message here a little confusing, and had to go code
>> spelunking to figure out what it might mean and how I should answer the
>> Y/N question.
>> 
>>     $ b4 prep --edit-cover
>>     Waiting for Emacs...
>>     Invoking git-filter-repo to update the cover letter.
>>     The previous run is older than a day (/home/davemarq/linux/linux/.git/worktrees/ibmvfc-fpin-bis/filter-repo/already_ran already exists).
>>     See "Already Ran" section in the manual for more information.
>>     Treat this run as a continuation of filtering in the previous run (Y/N)? n
>>     New history written in 612.22 seconds...
>>     Completely finished after 612.53 seconds.
>>     Cover letter updated.
>> 
>> I first searched the b4 manual, and found nothing about "Already Ran".
>> Eventually, on reading the b4 code in ez.py, I found this was from the
>> git-filter-repo package and I should check its manual. I found the code.
>> There's no way to opt out of this check and message.
>
> Yes, there is: simply by removing the file. That's what b4 is doing for
> a while, and it has been backported in the last stable version (0.14.3):
>
>
> https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/utils/b4/b4.git/commit/?h=stable-0.14.y&id=e5369681808b
>
> Is it not working on your side? If no, which b4 version are you using?

Yeah, this is weird. I'm running 0.15-dev, which is some snapshot of the
master. I just looked at the code that invokes RepoFilter, and here's
the code:

            frargs = fr.FilteringOptions.parse_args(['--force', '--quiet', '--refs', f'{commit}~1..HEAD'])
            frargs.refs = [f'{commit}~1..HEAD']
            frf = fr.RepoFilter(frargs, commit_callback=fred.callback)

So --force is what should remove the file, and for some reason its not
working.

I'll debug at my end to see if I've found a bug.

Thanks!

-Dave