newren / gitgitgadget

A gadget

A bot to serve as glue between GitHub Pull Requests and the Git mailing list

This project intends to help submit patch series to the Git mailing list. The process is not quite as painless for the contributor as opening Pull Requests, but at least it is much less painful than having to all the steps manually.

The idea is for users to open a Pull Request at

https://github.com/gitgitgadget/git

with a good description of their patch series. Then, the command /submit, issued via a comment on said PR will tell GitGitGadget to send the patches as mail thread to the Git mailing list, with the Pull Request's description as cover letter.

As is common, reviewers on the Git mailing list will probably ask for modifications. These should be folded into the respective commits (or inserted as stand-alone commits at an appropriate place in the patch series) via git rebase -i, followed by a force-push. Once everything is in a good shape, update the description to include information about changes performed relative to the latest patch series iteration, and then another /submit will ask GitGitGadget to send a new iteration of the patch series.

All relevant information, such as the current iteration of the patch series, the Message-ID of the sent mails, etc is stored in the Git notes in refs/notes/gitgitgadget.

Note: GitGitGadget will Cc: the original authors when sending patches on their behalf, and people mentioned in the Cc: footer of the Pull Request description.

Furthermore, for all iterations of a patch series but the first one, GitGitGadget will insert a machine-generated representation of what changed, and reply to the cover letter of the previous iteration.

For convenience of reviewers, GitGitGadget will generate tags for each iteration it sent, and push those to https://github.com/gitgitgadget/git. Links to those tags will be included in the cover letter.