When running with -m (check for missing backports) we often have to fill
lots of information that can be determined automatically the vast majority
of the time:
- restart point (last cherry-picked ID from one of the last commits)
- current branch (HEAD)
- reference branch (the one that contains most of the last commits)
These elements are not that hard to determine, so let's make sure we
can fall back to them when running in missing mode.
The reference branch is guessed by looking at the upstream branch that
most frequently contains some of the last 10 commits. It can be inaccurate
if multiple branches exist with these commits, or when upstream changes
due to a non-LTS branch disappearing in the middle of the series, in which
case passing "-r" will help. But most of the time it works OK. It also gives
precedence to local branches over remote ones for such choices. A test in
2.4 at commit 793a4b520 correctly shows 2.6/master as the upstream despite
2.5 having been used for the early ones of the tag.
For the restart point, we assume that the most recent commit that was
backported serves as a reference (and not the most recently backported
commit). This means that the usual case where an old commit was found
to be missing will not fool the analysis. Commits are inspected from
2 commits before the last tag, and reordered from the parent's tree
to see which one is the last one.
With this, it's sufficient to issue "git-show-backports -q -m" to get
the list of backports from the upstream branch, restarting from the
last backported one.
The early version of the script used to support passing non-branch
arguments but as it evolved we lost that option. Let's use "--" as a
delimiter after the branch(es) to pass optional file names to filter
on. This is convenient to list missing patches on a specific set of
files.
It's cumbersome to copy-paste a commit ID into another window after having
typed "git cherry-pick -sx", so let's have the suggested output format of
git-show prepare this line just before the subject line, it remains at a
stable position on the terminal when searching for "/^commit". One just
has to copy-paste the line into another terminal will result in the commit
being properly picked.
We've never used the output of the rightmost branch with this tool,
and it systematically causes two identical outputs making the job
harder during backport sessions. Let's simply remove the right part
when it's identical to the left one. This also adds a few line feeds
to make the output more readable.
Given that some OSes have bash in /usr/local/bin and in order not to
give too easy an excuse to Olivier for not backporting fixes, let's
make a few scripts rely on /usr/bin/env bash instead of /bin/bash :-)
Sometimes certain commits don't contain useful tracking information but
we'd still like to be able to report them. Here we implement a hash on
the author's name, e-mail and date, the subject and the body before the
first s-o-b or cherry-picked line. These parts are supposed to be
reasonable invariant across backports and are usable to compute an
invariant hash of a given commit. When we don't find ancestry in a
commit, we try this method (if -H is specified) to compare commits
hashes and we can report a match. The equivalent commit is reported
as "XXXX+?" to indicate that it's an apparent backport but we don't
know how far it goes.
This is very convenient for backport reviews as in a single
command you get all the patches one at a time with their
changelog and backport instructions.
When comparing very different branches, it can take a very long time
to scan all commits from the very old common ancestor (eg: haproxy
1.4 to 1.7). Now it is possible to specify a range of commits instead
of a specific branch, and the analysis will be limited to this range
for all commits. The user is responsible for ensuring that the range
covers all possible backports from base to ref, otherwise some of them
may be reported missing while they are not.
This also works with linux kernels, for example :
git-show-backports -u -q -m -r v3.14.69 -b v3.14.65 v3.10.101..HEAD
When git-show-backports is called with -u, instead of reporting the
commit IDs of the original branch on the left, it will display the
upstream commit IDs when such IDs are known, and will also display
them in the suggested "git cherry-pick" command line. This is useful
when the new branch is more recent than the one being checked and/or
it is desired to get rid of intermediary changes.
These ones have been used for several months already and are quite
convenient to emit new releases and backport fixes. I'm fed up with
having different versions on different machines, let's commit them
now.
