Re: Opinion poll: Sending an automated email to a thread when it gets added to the commitfest

On Thu, 15 Aug 2024 at 15:33, Peter Eisentraut <peter(at)eisentraut(dot)org> wrote:
> Maybe this kind of thing should rather be on the linked-to web page, not
> in every email.

Yeah, I'll first put a code snippet on the page for the commitfest entry.

> But a more serious concern here is that the patches created by the cfbot
> are not canonical. There are various heuristics when they get applied.
> I would prefer that people work with the actual patches sent by email,
> at least unless they know exactly what they are doing. We don't want to
> create parallel worlds of patches that are like 90% similar but not
> really identical.

I'm not really sure what kind of heuristics and resulting differences
you're worried about here. The heuristics it uses are very simple and
are good enough for our CI. Basically they are:
1. Unzip/untar based on file extension
2. Apply patches using "patch" in alphabetic order

Also, when I apply patches myself, I use heuristics too. And my
heuristics are probably different from yours. So I'd expect that many
people using the exact same heuristic would only make the situation
better. Especially because if people don't know exactly what they are
doing, then their heuristics are probably not as good as the one of
our cfbot. I know I've struggled a lot the first few times when I was
manually applying patches.