rfc: treewide scripted patch mechanism? (was: Re: [PATCH] Makefile: Convert -Wimplicit-fallthrough=3 to just -Wimplicit-fallthrough for clang)

From: Joe Perches
Date: Fri Aug 16 2019 - 15:58:34 EST


On Sat, 2019-08-10 at 13:33 -0700, Joe Perches wrote:
> On Sat, 2019-08-10 at 13:18 -0700, Joe Perches wrote:
[]
> > There are classes of patches generated by scripts that have
> > no real mechanism to be applied today.
> >
> > For instance: global coccinelle scripted changes to use stracpy
> > https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/alpine.DEB.2.21.1907251747560.2494@hadrien/
> >
> > and trivial scripted changes to MAINTAINERS
> > https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/6482e6546dc328ec47b07dba9a78a9573ebb3e56.camel@xxxxxxxxxxx/
> >
> > that are basically impossible to be applied by anyone but you.
> >
> > Otherwise there are hundreds of little micro patches most of
> > which would not otherwise be applied.
> >
> > There should be some process available to get these treewide
> > or difficult to keep up-to-date and apply patches handled.
> >
> > I believe these sorts of scripted patches should ideally
> > be handled immediately before an RC1 so other trees can be
> > synchronized in the simplest way possible.
>
> Hey Stephen
>
> Question for you about a possible -next process change.
>
> Would it be reasonable to have some mechanism to script
> treewide patches to generate and apply after Andrew Morton's
> mmotm patches are applied to -next?
>
> This could allow treewide scripted patches to have
> compilation and test coverage before possibly being
> applied to Linus' tree.
>
> What would be necessary to allow this?

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