Re: [PATCH] scripts: stable: add script to validate backports

[Greg Kroah-Hartman]

On Tue, Mar 16, 2021 at 02:31:33PM -0700, Nick Desaulniers wrote:
> A common recurring mistake made when backporting patches to stable is
> forgetting to check for additional commits tagged with `Fixes:`. This
> script validates that local commits have a `commit <sha40> upstream.`
> line in their commit message, and whether any additional `Fixes:` shas
> exist in the `master` branch but were not included. It can not know
> about fixes yet to be discovered, or fixes sent to the mailing list but
> not yet in mainline.
> 
> To save time, it avoids checking all of `master`, stopping early once
> we've reached the commit time of the earliest backport. It takes 0.5s to
> validate 2 patches to linux-5.4.y when master is v5.12-rc3 and 5s to
> validate 27 patches to linux-4.19.y. It does not recheck dependencies of
> found fixes; the user is expected to run this script to a fixed point.
> It depnds on pygit2 python library for working with git, which can be
> installed via:
> $ pip3 install pygit2
> 
> It's expected to be run from a stable tree with commits applied.  For
> example, consider 3cce9d44321e which is a fix for f77ac2e378be. Let's
> say I cherry picked f77ac2e378be into linux-5.4.y but forgot
> 3cce9d44321e (true story). If I ran:
> 
> $ ./scripts/stable/check_backports.py
> Checking 1 local commits for additional Fixes: in master
> Please consider backporting 3cce9d44321e as a fix for f77ac2e378be

While interesting, I don't use a git tree for the stable queue, so this
doesn't really fit into my workflow, sorry.

And we do have other "stable tree helper" scripts in the
stable-queue.git repo, perhaps that's a better place for this than the
main kernel repo?

thanks,

greg k-h