RFE: use patchwork to submit a patch

[Konstantin Ryabitsev]

On Thu, Oct 10, 2019 at 03:07:29PM -0300, Mauro Carvalho Chehab wrote:
>> - the patch submission screen has a succession of screens:
>>
>>   1. a screen with a single field allowing a user to paste a URL to
>>      their fork of the git repository.
>
>This will raise the bar, as it will force all developers to have a
>public site to host the tree. I guess only a fraction of the 4k kernel
>devs have it... In special, the ones that just want to send us a patch
>fixing a bug may have serious troubles implementing that.

I don't think this will raise the bar, as Github/Gitlab allow for very 
easy forking of https://github.com/torvalds/linux. This is also not at 
all aimed at "all developers" -- only those that don't want to use the 
current CLI workflow and are more comfortable with web tools like 
Github.

>>   2. next screen asks the user to select the ref to work from using 
>>      the
>>      list obtained from the remote. Once submitted, patchwork performs a
>>      `git clone --reference` to clone the repository locally using a
>>      local fork of the same repo to minimize object transfer. This part
>>      requires that:
>>        a. patchwork project is configured with a path to a local fork,
>>           if this feature is enabled for a project
>>        b. that fork is kept current via some mechanism outside of
>>           patchwork (e.g. with grokmirror)
>>        c. there is some sanity-checking during the clone process to
>>           avoid abuse (e.g. a sane timeout, a tmpdir with limited size,
>>           etc -- other suggestions welcome)
>
>That would require a high bandwidth at the machine with as patchwork.
>Also, doesn't sound a good idea to me, as the server may end by having
>tons of open sections, most waiting for tens of minutes, in order to
>complete git clone.

This is actually really fast if you already have a local copy of the 
repository with most objects. Try this yourself if you have 
torvalds/linux.git locally:

git clone --bare -s torvalds/linux.git test
cd test
git remote add arm-soc https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/arm/arm-soc
git fetch arm-soc for-next

The whole process takes a second or so and the resulting repo is 328K in 
size.

Of course, this assumes that the remote repository isn't trying to do 
something nasty, which is why I suggest anti-abuse precautions.

>> I know this is a pretty big RFE, and I would like to hear your 
>> thoughts
>> about this. If there is general agreement that this is doable/good idea,
>> I may be able to come up with funding for this development as part of
>> the overall tooling improvement proposal.
>
>The procedure itself is not bad, but, if implemented, IMHO, it should,
>instead, be something that will run at the machine of the one submitting
>the patch. For instance, this could be a perl or python script inside
>Kernel's ./script directory that would handle everything locally, and
>then submit the patch via patchwork's REST API.

I think I didn't make clear that this isn't supposed to go straight to 
patchwork. Patchwork is merely a convenient tool where this happens -- 
the resulting patch gets mailed out to the mailing list just as the user 
would have done.

-K