Re: [poky] [PATCH RFC] add basic support for b4 contribution workflow

On Thu, 2025-01-23 at 16:44 +0100, Quentin Schulz via lists.yoctoproject.org wrote:
> From: Quentin Schulz <[email protected]>
> 
> b4[1] is a very nice tool for mail-based contribution. A config[2] file
> exists to set up a few defaults. We can use it to set the Cc recipients
> to always add, in our case the mailing list.
> 
> This also adds a wrapper script that is called by b4 to check that each
> patch in the series is only for one project. Indeed, poky is actually
> a "collection" of multiple repositories, namely BitBake,
> OpenEmbedded-Core and the Yocto Docs. One patch should therefore not
> make changes in multiple of those projects otherwise it cannot be
> merged.
> Additionally, a check is added to make sure that a series only touches
> files from one project to avoid having to figure out which patch is to
> be merged by which maintainer in which project repo.
> 
> Moreover, it is not uncommon to have people develop patches for those
> projects from within poky. This wrapper figures out which mailing lists
> to send patches to based on the files that are modified in the series.
> Considering that patches to the bitbake/doc/ directory need to be sent
> to both the bitbake and yocto-docs mailing list, this wrapper handles
> that. A limitation of the script (lsdiff actually) is that it doesn't
> know how to handle empty files, but those should be of rather rare
> occurrences.
> 
> Note that this script requires hardcoding of paths that are handled by
> different projects to map files to projects. Anything not mapped is
> assumed part of OE-Core.
> 
> [1] https://pypi.org/project/b4/
> [2] https://b4.docs.kernel.org/en/latest/config.html
> 
> Signed-off-by: Quentin Schulz <[email protected]>
> ---
> This is marked as RFC because I believe there's some additional plumbing
> required to make this work reliably.
> 
> Indeed, OE-Core will also get its own .b4-config,
> c.f. https://lore.kernel.org/openembedded-core/[email protected]/T/#u
> 
> So the same file will exist in both OE-Core and poky, at the same
> location. The one from poky should always be this one (or with changes
> contributed via the poky mailing list) and not overridden during a merge
> by an update from the one in OE-Core. Not sure how to handle that yet
> though, does anyone know how this merging of trees is done in poky and
> what can be done to make this safe?

I can sort that bit. Basically we mark the config file as not being
synced by combo-layer.

> There's also a decision that was made to not allow patches to different
> projects in a series, but maybe that's not desired.
> 
> Finally, I'm not sure about the appropriate copyright holder for the
> patch and the license, I personally don't care, so up to you.

Those look fine to me.

> ---
>  .b4-config    |   3 ++
>  b4-wrapper.py | 162 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
>  2 files changed, 165 insertions(+)

I'm not against this but I would like to:

a) Put the script into OE-Core, just so that we don't have "magic"
things in poky.
b) Perhaps name it something a little more poky specific
c) Move it into the scripts subdir

Cheers,

Richard