Hi all,

As some of you are aware some of my colleagues and I have been working on
improving how incoming patches are handled - initially for OE-Core but we hope
to arrive at something that will be useful for other layers as well. The aim
was to do so without adversely affecting existing workflows, so that means
building on top of the things we already have. It's taken a bit longer than
we'd originally planned - we embarked on this a little over a year ago [1] -
but now I am happy to be able to show some meaningful progress.

A few months ago we upgraded OE's patchwork instance [2], moving not just to a
later version but to a fork of patchwork where a bunch of new functionality
was being developed for freedesktop.org [3], notably support for capturing and
presenting patch series instead of just individual patches. There were some
teething problems but we've now resolved most of them. Unfortunately work on
said freedesktop.org fork appears to have stalled so for now we have forked it
ourselves [4]; long term we'll have to see if we can merge back with patchwork
upstream - at least for small fixes we'll try to push those back up
independent of any wholesale merge. In any event we are now finally in the
position where our patchwork instance can be relied upon to collect emails,
and the UI is much improved. This should give us a bit more visibility into
where patches are at in the process, although we are still working on a few
places where patch series status needs to be updated (e.g. when a patch goes
into testing).

On top of patchwork we have built a simple smoke-testing framework called
"patchtest" [5] along with a suite of corresponding tests for OE [6]. These
tests are fairly simplistic at this point but check the basics such as whether
a patch has been properly signed off, etc. We should soon start seeing replies
sent to the mailing list and to submitters with results if there are any
failures, saving us from noticing and pointing out some of the more obvious
classes of mistakes. The tests are easy to run locally without the rest of the
infrastructure and can be extended without difficulty, and I expect we'll
continue to work on those as time progresses. Contributions would be very
welcome.

My sincere thanks to José Lamego, Leonardo Sandoval, Daniela Plascencia,
Belen Barros Pena, Michael Halstead, Damien Lespiau, Patrick Ohly and others
that have been part of implementing this, and to everyone else who has put up
with the delays.

Please let us know if you have issues with any part of this process or
suggestions on how to improve it. We're tracking improvements in the Yocto
Project bugzilla [7] so you can see what's being worked on there if you're
interested.

Cheers,
Paul

[1] Earlier announcement:
https://www.mail-archive.com/openembedded-core@lists.openembedded.org/msg72952.html

[2] OE's patchwork instance:
http://patchwork.openembedded.org

[3] Freedesktop.org patchwork fork:
https://github.com/dlespiau/patchwork

[4] Our patchwork fork:
http://git.yoctoproject.org/cgit/cgit.cgi/patchwork/

[5] Patchtest main repository:
http://git.yoctoproject.org/cgit/cgit.cgi/patchtest/

[6] OE test suite for patchtest:
http://git.yoctoproject.org/cgit/cgit.cgi/patchtest-oe/

[7] Yocto Project bugzilla area for patchwork/patchtest:
https://bugzilla.yoctoproject.org/describecomponents.cgi?product=Patchwork%2FPatchtest

--

Paul Eggleton
Intel Open Source Technology Centre