Re: b4 review batching operations

On Mon, Jun 29, 2026 at 07:01:22PM +0100, Mark Brown wrote:
> Going through my post -rc1 stack of patches to apply using b4 review it
> occurs to me that it would really benefit from being able to batch up
> operations - the interface is fairly laggy, partly but not entirely due
> to doing checkouts per patch, and requires quite a few interactions per
> series (take, confirmation dialog, thank, confirmation dialog, edit
> message to fix up tree, queue with more if it's a series) so the whole
> procedure is very much slower than it would have been with my custom
> scripting.

Yes, I should definitely think about features that would aim at high-rate
reviewers like yourself. The current TUI model works well for a R: reviewer,
but for an M: maintainer of a busy subsystem (or several), a lot of design
choices would be actively slowing them down.

What I'm thinking:

- tag multiple series at once
- create a playbook for the order in which to apply them
- run the playbook as a single take+thank+archive routine

There will be caveats and corner-cases to deal with, such as backing out if
a series in the middle of the playbook causes too much grief, but nothing
seems insurmountable.

I'm away for a couple of weeks, but I'll refocus on that after I return.

Thanks for the feedback!

-K