How Red Hat uses GitLab for kernel development

Posted Oct 2, 2021 20:01 UTC (Sat) by bfields (subscriber, #19510)
In reply to: How Red Hat uses GitLab for kernel development by fratti
Parent article: How Red Hat uses GitLab for kernel development

>I cannot even begin to imagine how painful it must be for reviewers to trust me that I only changed the parts of the driver I said I changed in my cover letter in a subsequent submission of a driver, or to reference back to the comments on the previous submission to see if everything has been addressed.

It's not *that* hard to find the previous version in my saved mail and compare.

You could compare two versions with

$ git checkout -b foo-v1 origin/master
$ git am foo-v1-mbox
$ git checkout -b foo-v2 origin/master
$ git am foo-v2-mbox

and then

$ git diff foo-v1..foo-v2

$ git diff foo-v1^^..foo-v2^^

though I've rarely done that in practice.

Probably this should all be easier, but it's not impossible.

How Red Hat uses GitLab for kernel development

Posted Oct 2, 2021 20:35 UTC (Sat) by fratti (guest, #105722) [Link] (3 responses)

I've also just found out about the --interdiff switch of git format-patch, so I suppose the ball is in my court to make things easier for maintainers. (Though admittedly, this again places the trust in the submitter to not mess this comparison up, either accidentally or intentionally.)

Perhaps all we need is a --supplants=<message id> for git send-email to get better tracking of patch series.

Thank you for sharing your perspective.

How Red Hat uses GitLab for kernel development

Posted Oct 2, 2021 22:59 UTC (Sat) by zev (subscriber, #88455) [Link] (2 responses)

I've yet to actually use it myself, by Konstantin Ryabitsev's b4 tool appears to offer support for comparing revisions of a patch series: https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/utils/b4/b4.git/tree/b4/co...

Personally, I've recently found myself often wishing that "Link:" tags were more universally used. Commit messages are nice, but it's not at all infrequent that I really want to find the discussion that preceded a patch being accepted. Without a nice lore.kernel.org link right there, finding that is a lot more tedious.

How Red Hat uses GitLab for kernel development

Posted Oct 4, 2021 14:19 UTC (Mon) by willy (subscriber, #9762) [Link] (1 responses)

You must not be aware of https://cregit.linuxsources.org/

How Red Hat uses GitLab for kernel development

Posted Oct 4, 2021 16:48 UTC (Mon) by zev (subscriber, #88455) [Link]

Indeed I was not -- that does looks quite useful! Though after a few minutes of poking at it semi-randomly, its patch-discussion linking seems fairly spotty unfortunately (oddly, often failing even in cases where there is a Link: tag right there in the commit message). Nevertheless, I'll probably be making use of that in the future, thanks for the tip.

How Red Hat uses GitLab for kernel development

Posted Oct 3, 2021 19:15 UTC (Sun) by mkubecek (guest, #130791) [Link]

How about "git range-diff origin/master foo-v1 foo-v2"? Or "git range-diff [prev base]..foo-v1 origin/master..foo-v2" if I still have the branch from v1 review and don't want to rebase it.