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Has a tool ever been written for automated maintenance+CI of a downstream patch set / fork? In other words, I have an upstream repo, and I want to maintain my own repo which is upstream plus a set of patches. [1/2]

comex

@comex

Feb 23, 2021

But whenever upstream receives a commit, I want automation to try applying the patch set on top of the new commit, and if it works, build+test the result. On failure, notify humans. There should be an explicit, mutable mapping of original commit -> patched commit. [2/2]

comex

@comex

Feb 23, 2021

This could be useful in many scenarios. Linux distros’ package patches, Rust’s fork of LLVM, ungoogled-chromium, Linux hardware forks (though you should upstream!)… Today these tend to involve someone manually rebasing/merging, and as such only update upon major releases.

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Talk with

maybe? I don’t know how he manages his Android fork but it’s pretty effective.

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and

There is a fair bit of scripting being used but the core of our approach is keeping everything cleanly rebased and obsessively cleaning up / minimizing / reviewing our patch sets to the upstream repositories. Also, tricking upstream into doing our work for us tends to work well.

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and

Figuring out how to file issues relevant to us upstream as security bugs or enterprise support bugs is an important art form. You can see we have a bunch of scripts like github.com/GrapheneOS/scr and github.com/GrapheneOS/scr but I have a lot that's not cleaned up to be published.

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and

We'd like to be trying to land a lot of stuff upstream again but we've had a lot to deal with recently. Focusing on development at all has been difficult. Our changes to Chromium aren't as substantial and we feel most could realistically be landed upstream as build configuration.

5:58 PM · Feb 23, 2021Twitter Web App

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and

Chromium is used by a bunch of projects including major browsers like Microsoft Edge. The upstream open source project should really be a lot more vendor neutral in the first place. Should be easier to change defaults and services should be optional / have configurable provider.

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and

I wouldn't want to deal with CI applying our Chromium patches repeatedly as it goes through development. If we had more resources, we'd rather start porting / testing patches to a Beta release for an upcoming major release and have most ready for the upcoming Stable release.

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