[RFC] Updating patchwork patches on commit

[Siddhesh Poyarekar]

[Re-sending because I don't know how to type email addresses.]

Hi,

I have been running some hacked up scripts to update patch state on 
patchwork for every commit that goes into the glibc repository.  The 
script simply walks through commits in a date range, hashes the diffs 
from each ref (using patchwork/hasher.py) and compares it with hashes on 
patchwork.  If the patch as been committed with the diff unchanged, the 
hashes match.  This is very similar to the git hook that patchwork 
ships[1], so I hope to eventually add this into the glibc git hook.

In the last run (2020-12-07), of the 33 commits went in since 
2020-12-01, 19 were found in patchwork and 14 were missing.  The week 
before (2020-11-23 - 2020-12-01) it was 19 found and 9 missing.

This means that diffs of 14 patches were modified before committing. Our 
commit policy explicitly allows this and trusts committers to limit 
these changes to trivial fixes.  However for patchwork usage to be 
valuable (and in the process, improve transparency), a 1:1 
correspondence between git commits and patchwork would be ideal.  That 
is, every commit on git should have at least one[2] patchwork entry. 
This also solves the question "What finally went in?" I've had to ask 
myself repeatedly when cleaning up patchwork state.

We could achieve this without additional busy work by having the git 
hook send out [pushed] emails to the list in addition to glibc-cvs 
(libc-alpha should be spared the private branch traffic of course) 
whenever it sees a commit that it can't find on patchwork.  A nightly 
script can then trivially mark all [pushed] patches as committed.

Thoughts?

Siddhesh

[1] 
https://github.com/getpatchwork/patchwork/blob/master/tools/post-receive.hook
[2] People have been known to send out identical patches repeatedly as 
part of a series.