comparison en/mq-collab.tex @ 105:ecacb6b4c9fd

Grouping patches in the series file.

104:32bf9a5f22c0

While it's easy to pick up straightforward uses of Mercurial Queues,
use of a little discipline and some of MQ's less frequently used
capabilities makes it possible to work in complicated development
environments.

In this chapter, I will discuss a technique I have developed to manage
the development of an Infiniband device driver for the Linux kernel.
The driver in question is large (at least as drivers go), with 25,000
lines of code spread across 35 source files.  It is maintained by a
small team of developers.

While much of the material in this chapter is specific to Linux, the
same principles apply to any code base for which you're not the
primary owner, and upon which you need to do a lot of development.

  developers in the kernel community, who make ``drive-by''
  modifications to the driver as they develop and refine kernel
  subsystems.
\item We also maintain a number of ``backports'' to older versions of
  the Linux kernel, to support the needs of customers who are running
  older Linux distributions that do not incorporate our drivers.
\item Finally, we make software releases on a schedule that is
  necessarily not aligned with those used by Linux distributors and
  kernel developers, so that we can deliver new features to customers
  without forcing them to upgrade their entire kernels or
  distributions.

In principle, Mercurial Queues seems like a good candidate to manage a
development scenario such as the above.  While this is indeed the
case, MQ contains a few added features that make the job more
pleasant.

\section{Conditionally applying patches with guards}

Perhaps the best way to maintain sanity with so many targets is to be
able to choose specific patches to apply for a given situation.  MQ
provides a feature called ``guards'' (which originates with quilt's
\texttt{guards} command) that does just this.  To start off, let's

We can see the effect the selected guards have when we run
\hgcmd{qpush}.
\interaction{mq.guards.qselect.qpush}

A guard cannot start with a ``\texttt{+}'' or ``\texttt{-}''
character.
\interaction{mq.guards.qselect.error}
Changing the selected guards changes the patches that are applied.
\interaction{mq.guards.qselect.quux}
You can see here that negative guards take precedence over positive
guards.
\interaction{mq.guards.qselect.foobar}

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105:ecacb6b4c9fd

While it's easy to pick up straightforward uses of Mercurial Queues,
use of a little discipline and some of MQ's less frequently used
capabilities makes it possible to work in complicated development
environments.

In this chapter, I will use as an example a technique I have used to
manage the development of an Infiniband device driver for the Linux
kernel.  The driver in question is large (at least as drivers go),
with 25,000 lines of code spread across 35 source files.  It is
maintained by a small team of developers.

While much of the material in this chapter is specific to Linux, the
same principles apply to any code base for which you're not the
primary owner, and upon which you need to do a lot of development.

  developers in the kernel community, who make ``drive-by''
  modifications to the driver as they develop and refine kernel
  subsystems.
\item We also maintain a number of ``backports'' to older versions of
  the Linux kernel, to support the needs of customers who are running
  older Linux distributions that do not incorporate our drivers.  (To
  \emph{backport} a piece of code is to modify it to work in an older
  version of its target environment than the version it was developed
  for.)
\item Finally, we make software releases on a schedule that is
  necessarily not aligned with those used by Linux distributors and
  kernel developers, so that we can deliver new features to customers
  without forcing them to upgrade their entire kernels or
  distributions.

In principle, Mercurial Queues seems like a good candidate to manage a
development scenario such as the above.  While this is indeed the
case, MQ contains a few added features that make the job more
pleasant.

\section{Conditionally applying patches with 
  guards}

Perhaps the best way to maintain sanity with so many targets is to be
able to choose specific patches to apply for a given situation.  MQ
provides a feature called ``guards'' (which originates with quilt's
\texttt{guards} command) that does just this.  To start off, let's

We can see the effect the selected guards have when we run
\hgcmd{qpush}.
\interaction{mq.guards.qselect.qpush}

A guard cannot start with a ``\texttt{+}'' or ``\texttt{-}''
character.  The name of a guard must start with an alphabetic
character (upper or lower case) or an underscore.  The rest of the
guard's name can contain any of these characters, or a digit.  These
rules are similar to those used for variable naming in most popular
programming languages.  If you try to use a guard with an invalid
name, MQ will complain:
\interaction{mq.guards.qselect.error}
Changing the selected guards changes the patches that are applied.
\interaction{mq.guards.qselect.quux}
You can see in the example below that negative guards take precedence
over positive guards.
\interaction{mq.guards.qselect.foobar}

\section{MQ's rules for applying patches}

The rules that MQ uses when deciding whether to apply a patch
are as follows.
\begin{itemize}
\item A patch that has no guards is always applied.
\item If the patch has any negative guard that matches any currently
  selected guard, the patch is skipped.
\item If the patch has any positive guard that matches any currently
  selected guard, the patch is applied.
\item If the patch has positive or negative guards, but none matches
  any currently selected guard, the patch is skipped.
\end{itemize}

\section{Trimming the work environment}

In working on the device driver I mentioned earlier, I don't apply the
patches to a normal Linux kernel tree.  Instead, I use a repository
that contains only a snapshot of the source files and headers that are
relevant to Infiniband development.  This repository is~1\% the size
of a kernel repository, so it's easier to work with.

I then choose a ``base'' version on top of which the patches are
applied.  This is a snapshot of the Linux kernel tree as of a revision
of my choosing.  When I take the snapshot, I record the changeset ID
from the kernel repository in the commit message.  Since the snapshot
preserves the ``shape'' and content of the relevant parts of the
kernel tree, I can apply my patches on top of either my tiny
repository or a normal kernel tree.

Normally, the base tree atop which the patches apply should be a
snapshot of a very recent upstream tree.  This best facilitates the
development of patches that can easily be submitted upstream with few
or no modifications.

\section{Dividing up the \sfilename{series} file}

I categorise the patches in the \sfilename{series} file into a number
of logical groups.  Each section of like patches begins with a block
of comments that describes the purpose of the patches that follow.

The sequence of patch groups that I maintain follows.  The ordering of
these groups is important; I'll describe why after I introduce the
groups.
\begin{itemize}
\item The ``accepted'' group.  Patches that the development team has
  submitted to the maintainer of the Infiniband subsystem, and which
  he has accepted, but which are not present in the snapshot that the
  tiny repository is based on.  These are ``read only'' patches,
  present only to transform the tree into a similar state as it is in
  the upstream maintainer's repository.
\item The ``rework'' group.  Patches that I have submitted, but that
  the upstream maintainer has requested modifications to before he
  will accept them.
\item The ``pending'' group.  Patches that I have not yet submitted to
  the upstream maintainer, but which we have finished working on.
  These will be ``read only'' for a while.  If the upstream maintainer
  accepts them upon submission, I'll move them to the end of the
  ``accepted'' group.  If he requests that I modify any, I'll move
  them to the beginning of the ``rework'' group.
\item The ``in progress'' group.  Patches that are actively being
  developed, and should not be submitted anywhere yet.
\item The ``backport'' group.  Patches that adapt the source tree to
  older versions of the kernel tree.
\item The ``do not ship'' group.  Patches that for some reason should
  never be submitted upstream.  For example, one such patch might
  change embedded driver identification strings to make it easier to
  distinguish, in the field, between an out-of-tree version of the
  driver and a version shipped by a distribution vendor.
\end{itemize}

Now to return to the reasons for ordering groups of patches in this
way.  We would like the lowest patches in the stack to be as stable as
possible, so that we will not need to rework higher patches due to
changes in context.  Putting patches that will never be changed first
in the \sfilename{series} file serves this purpose.

We would also like the patches that we know we'll need to modify to be
applied on top of a source tree that resembles the upstream tree as
closely as possible.  This is why we keep accepted patches around for
a while.

The ``backport'' and ``do not ship'' patches float at the end of the
\sfilename{series} file in part because they'll never be shipped
upstream.  Additionally, the backport patches must be applied on top
of all other patches.

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