[PATCH 00/10] Add series support

[Finucane, Stephen]

On 15 Jun 12:11, Andrew Donnellan wrote:
> On 15/06/16 11:58, Russell Currey wrote:
> >Currently in Patchwork, individual patches can have a reported test state (or a
> >Check, as it's referred to in the docs).  I couldn't find anything in this
> >series that affects this, what are your thoughts on moving that functionality
> >from a patch model to a series model?  Any kind of tests run on a patch are
> >typically focused on the entire series.
> 
> I'd like to see the ability to report a test state against an entire
> series, but I think it would be useful to keep test states against
> individual patches as well.

This has come up for discussion before, and the same argument for not
doing it back then still stands now: bisectability. If you have N
patches in a series, then tests should pass for every single patch (+
dependencies) in the series. By testing a whole series, we can't
validate this (or, at least we can't be explicit about this). In
addition, I consider series (well, series revisions) as mere containers
for patches, and I'd be very reluctant to add much logic to them.

The best option we might have, if per-series reporting is really
necessary, is to allow Check uploading against a Series endpoint. This
would actually cause N Checks to be created - one for each Patch in the
series - meaning each Patch could still be individually queried. It
would be a bit of a lie (we didn't actually test the patch by itself,
therefore it might be broken) and I wouldn't promote this workflow
myself (bisectability FTW), but it could be a good way of dealing with
extremely long-running or resource-intensive test suites, where
per-patch validation would be too expensive.

Thoughts?

Stephen