Re: Automatic testing of patches in commit fest

On Tue, Sep 12, 2017 at 8:30 AM, Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> wrote:
> +1 ... seems like there's enough noise here that changing patch status
> based on the results might be premature. Still, I applaud the effort.

There are always going to be cases where the tool fails, unless there
are more formal guidelines on patch submission. For example, if
someone posts multiple patches, and did not use git format-patch, then
the heuristic on which order to apply patches in will fail at times. I
don't think it's necessary to constrain the patch format that people
use too much, but this does need to be thought out.

Another thing that I think needs to happen is that the CF app needs to
add a web API. Friends of mine who actually know about this stuff tell
me that JSON API is a good default choice these days. Currently,
Thomas fetches information from the CF app using "screen scraping"
techniques, which are obviously fairly brittle. Similarly, Thomas'
patch testing web application should itself have a web API,
potentially usable by the CF app.

--
Peter Geoghegan