[U-Boot] Patman failure on Linux Mint 14

[Gerhard Sittig <gsi@denx.de>]

Hi there!

Patman for some reason "doesn't work for me".  It won't find
commits from the sandbox/repo, but wants me to specify -c
manually.  Then it won't detect or cannot grok subject prefixes
and fails to determine email addresses.  From the documentation I
see how useful the tool is and feel how great and desirable it is
to have such a tool at hand when iterating a series through
review.  It's a pity that it won't run here.  Since it works for
others, the problem must be in my setup.


The git history suggests that Python 2.7.4 is required, while my
distribution (Linux Mint 14, derived from Ubuntu 12.10) ships
with 2.7.3.

OTOH this very Python version works for others, and a local
installation of 2.7.5 (default configure except for --prefix
$HOME) doesn't help either.


The unit test output is rather lengthy, yet apparently condenses
into just two spots and a lot of followup errors:

The testIndent() case in test.py won't pass (succeeds although
it's supposed to fail).  Changing 'tab' in GetData() from a
verbatim tab in quotes into an explicit '\t' doesn't help (but
visually more clearly reflects the specific type of whitespace).
Running the script under 'env LC_ALL=C' didn't help either.  Is
this some language or locale specific stuff that can be overcome
"from outside", or do I have a more severe problem with the
Python runtime where string operation and whitespace handling
isn't dependable?

Email address handling fails for the BuildEmailList(),
EmailPatches(), and LookupEmail() routines, and all of them for
the same reason of missing 'fileno' member in what's supposed to
be a file stream.  The specific error output is:

  AttributeError: _SpoofOut instance has no attribute 'fileno'

After searching the web I got that much:  When run under test
(doctest), file output is implemented by the _SpoofOut class to
catch programs' output, to compare runtime behaviour against
expectations.  While this stream setup mostly works for the
purpose of I/O and testing, it specifically lacks the 'fileno'
member and thus breaks those uses which rely on this property.

Can't tell whether this condition applies to "regular application
invocation" as well or to the specific libraries or abstractions
used in the patman setup (saw 'fileno' references in terminal and
process related stuff, but don't know enough Python to really
tell what to do there).  Just in case, I ran the unit test from
within screen(1) as well as without it in a mere terminal.


The local setup is:

  $ lsb_release -d -s
  Linux Mint 14 Nadia
  $ python --version
  Python 2.7.5
  $ git describe
  v2013.07-rc3-1-g1c2d113
  (one patch, the patman doc update)

Am I missing some external dependencies or proper configuration
(either in the system, in Python, in git, or in patman)?  What
can I do to better diagnose the issue or make patman work here as
well?  It's so great a tool!


virtually yours
Gerhard Sittig
-- 
DENX Software Engineering GmbH,     MD: Wolfgang Denk & Detlev Zundel
HRB 165235 Munich, Office: Kirchenstr. 5, D-82194 Groebenzell, Germany
Phone: +49-8142-66989-0 Fax: +49-8142-66989-80  Email: office at denx.de