[PATCH 00/10] Patchwork Autodelegate patches

[Finucane, Stephen]

On 28 Nov 10:14, Mauro Carvalho Chehab wrote:
> This patch series contain the non-LinuxTV specific patches,
> mainly the auto-delegate patches written by Laurent Pinchart.
> 
> Those got ported to patchwork upstream.
> 
> Please notice that I'm still fighting to finish the migration
> from Django 1.4 to Django 1.7. So, this patch series is not
> fully tested.
> 
> The auto-delegation patches are authored by Laurent, and were
> rebased by me to apply under the upstream branch. They're
> working for a long time at LinuxTV.org, but the rebase might
> cause some troubles on them.
> 
> So, please test.

[snip]

OK, so I've tested this. The rebase wasn't as bad as we feared and
while there are a few issues they're nothing serious (I'll reply to
these separately). However, I do have a design question I'd like to
pose to you, Laurent and anyone else interested, before I start
merging this.

My question is this: is there any advantage to providing a larger
"hook" system in patchwork? I ask this because this is the second
series that attempts a hook-style feature (the other being Damien's
git-send-email handler [1]). Both of these features do special actions
based on a patch's content: delegating a patch in this case and
ignoring it in the case of the git-send-email handler. I wonder if
there would be any advantage to making this more generic. For example:

    if patch.subject contains "models: " then set delegate to "Bob"
       |___________| |-----------------|      |--------------------|
          element      match criteria                  action

Some other examples:

    if patch.content contains "+++ hello_world.py" then set state to
        "rejected"
    if patch.author equals "example at example.org" then ...

This would provide an immense amount of flexibility, assuming this
flexibility would be beneficial. It would also allow us to avoid
creating Django migrations for each new feature of this sort, which
will keep the code simpler and reduce the load on the sysadmins
maintaining patchwork instances (we'd only need migrations if we
didn't scope out the actions sufficiently initially and ended up
needing new actions. 

However, all this is me thinking out loud for now, and I'm busy enough
reviewing patches and trying to get something approaching series
support into upstream (plus, you know, my day job) to volunteer
implementing this. As such, if you agree with my idea but don't think
it worth the effort (or just flat out disagree) then I'm happy to
give my review comments on this with an eye to merging it shortly. If
you do agree though, maybe we should hold off merging this until we
explore these options?

Thoughts?

Stephen