Re: [PATCH] Implement git-quiltimport (take 2)

Junio C Hamano [off-list ref] writes:

ebiederm@xmission.com (Eric W. Biederman) writes:

quoted

Importing a quilt patch series into git is not very difficult
but parsing the patch descriptions and all of the other
minutia take a bit of effort to get right, so this automates it.

Since git and quilt complement each other it makes sense
to make it easy to go back and forth between the two.

If a patch is encountered that it cannot derive the author
from the user is asked.

What's the expected workflow for you to work on a 1300 patch
series you get from Andrew in the next installment to deal with
88 unattributed patches?  Answer the question 88 times and make
sure you get the answers right every time?  Or abort and
hand-edit them to help mailinfo to notice the correct
attribution and re-run?

For the internal consumption case it isn't a big deal.  I
can specify --author with something bogus and it works. 

There are a few tweaks that can be made to git-mailinfo to
make it better at parsing information out of patches.  I
cut the list down to about 49 that way.  I had it all of the
way down to 1.  But then I realized that the first Singed-off-by
really doesn't accurately reflect the author.  I suspect a
few of my other teaks are equally suspicious.

I know I am guilty of suggesting "going interactive", but I have
a feeling that having an optional file that maps patch-name to
author might be easier to work with.  If the old patches are
recycled in the updated -mm set, you probably can reuse the
mapping for them, adding entries for newly introduced "unnamed"
patches as needed.

Short of getting the script where it has a sane restart in the
middle mode going interactive and asking questions makes a lot
of sense.  Especially with smaller trees.

For Andrews tree before I play anymore with technical solutions I
need to talk to Andrew and see if we can improve the situation
upstream.  Possibly with a quilt-audit script that finds problem
patches.

Eric