[PATCH 1/3] email-test-patchset: automatically obtain a base commit to test against

[Artem Bityutskiy]

On Tue, 2014-03-11 at 08:27 -0700, Jacob Keller wrote:
> In our environment, a queue of patches is used. Often, developers will
> submit a v2 of a patch already in the queue before the maintainer can
> "pop" this patch off the queue. This function setup here enables
> determining if a patch with the same canonical subject is already
> applied to the tree. A special parameter "base" is used to prevent going
> back before the "published" upstream branch of the tree.
> 
> This enables aiaiai to be smart enough to figure out when a patch should
> be tested against the tip of queue, or against the parent of a previous
> version. This relies on new patch versions having identical canonical
> subject lines, though. (Equivalent except for the [... PATCH ...]
> prefix(es)

What do you think would it make sense implement it this way.

1. Implement a separate script which tries to check whether a similar
patch is already applied. And if yes, this script returns the commit id
which has to be used as the base commit for testing.

May we we could use term 'hooks' for this? Then this specific hook could
be called something like 'aiaiai-email-newbase-hook' or something.

BTW, it may make sense to remove the 'aiaiai' prefix form all
non-user-facing scripts, like the helpers and e-mail... I would not
mind.

2. Add another config option which will list the hooks which
aiaiai-email-test-patchset has to execute. So the
'aiaiai-email-newbase-hook' gets executed, finds the new base, and
changes the 'pcfg_branch' value.

And, IIUC, this should be enough. The patch-set gets tested against than
new base.

How does this sound?

-- 
Best Regards,
Artem Bityutskiy