Re: The direction linux is taking

Oliver Xymoron
2001-12-29T18:02:59Z

On Fri, 28 Dec 2001, Daniel Phillips wrote:

> Hi Richard,
>
> On December 27, 2001 06:59 pm, Richard Gooch wrote:
> > But years of observations tells me that Linus likes the way he does
> > things and doesn't care if others don't like it. I don't expect to see
> > much change there.
>
> Except that, at the kernel summit this year, Linus *did* give the nod to a
> patchbot, in principle. I could have sworn.
>
> It seems clear that the challenge is to come up with something that really is
> so lightweight and useful that Linus will use it. That's the 'Linus test'.
> If somebody hands him a piece of crap to use then why would we expect him to
> deviate from his normal behaviour ;-)

If my understanding of the new kbuild and configure system is correct,
make clean and dep should be largely unnecessary and it should be possible
to build a patchbot that checks for incremental compilability:

for the current kernel release:
unpack tree
build the tree with default options (unprivileged user, obviously)

for each patch in queue:
copy tree (-a)
apply patch
if rejects:
bounce("doesn't cleanly apply to kernel x")
if not includes linux/patch.changelog:
bounce("doesn't include changelog entry")
if not includes linux/patch.config:
bounce("doesn't include possibly empty config options")
for each option in patch.config:
if not (cml2 --new-enable-option-from-command-line-feature option)
bounce("config option x couldn't be enabled")
if not (make): bounce("couldn't build patch: <diags>")
remove copied tree

Optimize above to deal with dependencies in the patch queue.

Then we need a web interface that allows rejects with various canned
messages:

applied, thanks
redundant
obviously incorrect
doesn't meet coding style (partially automatable with lindent)
too ugly to live
breaks code freeze, resubmit later
submit to appropriate maintainer
missing MAINTAINER entry
insufficient documentation
insufficient rationale
forgot configure.help text (automatable)
(custom message, of course)
(drop silently)

--
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