Re: Guix review bot

[Cyril Roelandt]

On 08/18/2015 05:22 PM, Ludovic Courtès wrote:
> Guix-Bot <address@hidden> skribis:
> 
>> This is Guix-Bot, a bot meant to put Guix reviewers out of a job. I reviewed
>> your patch, and here is what I can tell you about it:
>>
>> PATCH: /home/cyril/guix/0001-gnu-Add-xscreenshot.patch:
>> - The patch can be applied on top of master.
>> - The compilation succeeded.
>> - Guix lint failed:
>> gnu/packages/suckless.scm:220:5: xscreenshot-1.0: sentences in description 
>> should be followed by two spaces; possible infraction at 42
> 
> That sounds neat!  Could you tell us more about it?
> 

Well, I wanted to have automatic reviews for certain patches, so I wrote
a quick and dirty piece of Python code that, given an email, extracts a
patch from it, applies it on top of master, and runs "make" and "guix
lint <pkg>".

The idea was to use offlineimap to check my guix directory on a regular
basis, and inotify to trigger the Python code whenever a new mail was
fetched.

In the end, it is a bit more complex than what I thought, because there
are lots of ways to send a patch: there are different possible
encodings, one might send a patch attached to an email, or attach a
patch generated using git format-patch, or use git send-email... Also,
the code I wrote is Guix-centric, and it might be nice to have an
agnostic tool instead.

I think patchwork[1] does a nice job of keeping track of threads in
mailing-lists (which my tool cannot do at the moment), but I don't know
if it can trigger a CI build. Also, Qemu seems to have some sort of
email-based CI, but I am not sure what version is the "right" one (there
are forks at https://github.com/aliguori/patches,
https://github.com/stefanha/patches/tree/stefanha-tweaks and probably
some other places). There is also https://github.com/famz/patchew, but
it seems to require Docker...


tl;dr: I'm not sure exactly what the right tool to use is :)

Cyril.

[1] http://jk.ozlabs.org/projects/patchwork/