148047 - RotCheck - A tool for finding bitrotten patches.

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Bugzilla :: Attachments & Requests, enhancement, P5)

Description

[Matthew Tuck [:CodeMachine]]

It would be really useful to have a tool that could automatically test patches
and mark bitrotten patches as such.  Now you can't detect everything that's
bitrotten, but you can detect a lot of it, for example, that it no longer
applies to the tree.

So this tool would find all bugs in a bug list that have patches, and then test
each of them by pulling a new tree, attempting to apply the patch, optionally
running tests, and seeing if it worked.  If it didn't, it would then go and mark
the patch as bitrotten, by adding/removed keywords/attachment statuses.

It would be nice to be a standard Bugzilla feature, but given we need an account
to do stuff its probably best as a separate tool for the moment.

Comment 1

[Matthew Tuck [:CodeMachine]]

Implementation issue - in determining things like "this is broken", we should
always take care that unknown situations never lead to the patch being
considered broken.  For example, taking the return value from patch would be a
bad idea, it might be some other sort of error than unable-to-apply.

Instead, we should look for known regexps in the output, and only consider the
patch broken if we see exactly what we would expect to see in for broken
patches.

Comment 2

[Matthew Tuck [:CodeMachine]]

yadda yadda yadda forget reassign yadda yadda yadda

Comment 3

[Frédéric Buclin]

WONTFIX for the same reasons as in bug 167056 comment 8:

Patches depending on other patches, code being in cvs, bzr, hg, git, svn, etc... meaning supporting many repos to be valuable, guessing which branches a patch applies to, several languages to support (Perl, C, C++, Java, ...), etc... This may be cool for some installations as an extension, but I really don't want to support this feature in the core code.