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A little while back, I was again contemplating a tangled patch queue, considering how to rework it for landing. I thought it’d be nice to see at a very basic level which patches in the queue were going to be problematic, and which I could freely reorder at whim.

So I whipped together a silly little script to do that at a file level only. Example output:

% patchdeps
Note: This is based on filename collisions only, so may overreport conflicts
if patches touch different parts of the same file. (TODO)
                                                                          
A bug-663281-deque                   X   *       *     *   * *     *      
A bug-663281-deque-test              |   :       :     :   : *     :      
A bug-642054-func-setline          X |   *       :     :   : :     :      
A bug-642054-js_MapPCToLineNumber--' |   *       :     :   : :     :      
A bug-642054-rwreentrant             |   : X     :     :   : :     :      
A algorithm--------------------------'   X |     *     *   * *     *      
A system-libunwind                     X | |     :   * : * : *   * :      
A try-libunwind------------------------' | |     :   X : * : *   * :      
A backtrace------------------------------' | X * * * | * : * * * : * * * *
U shell-backtrace                          | | : * : | : : : : : : : : : :
U M-reentr---------------------------------' | : : : | : : : : : : : : : :
U M-backtrace--------------------------------' X : : | : : : : : : : * : :
U activities-----------------------------------' X : | : : : : * * : X * *
U profiler---------------------------------------' X | * : * * X * * | * *
U bug-675096-valgrind-jit--------------------------' | * : * : | : : | : :
U bug-599499-opagent-config--------------------------' X * : * | * : | : :
U bug-599499-opagent-----------------------------------' X X * | : * | : :
U bug-642320-gdb-jit-config------------------------------' | * | * : | : :
U bug-642320-gdb-jit---------------------------------------' X | : * | : :
U import-libunwind                                           | | : : | : :
U libunwind-config-------------------------------------------' | X X | : :
U warnings-fixes-----------------------------------------------' | | | : *
U bug-696965-cfi-autocheck---------------------------------------' | | X :
U mystery-librt-stuff----------------------------------------------' | | :
U bug-637393-eval-lifetime                                           | | :
U register-dwarf-----------------------------------------------------' | :
U bug-652535-JM__JIT_code_performance_counters-------------------------' X
U JSOP_RUNMODE-----------------------------------------------------------'

How to read it: patches that have no conflicts earlier in the stack are shown without a line next to them. They’re free spirits; you can “sink” them anywhere earlier in your queue without getting conflicts. (The script removes their lines to make the grid take up less horizontal space.)

Any other patch gets a horizontal line that then bends up to show the interference pattern with earlier patches. All in all, you have a complete interference matrix showing whether the set of files touched by any patch intersects the set of files for any other patch.

‘X’ marks the first conflict. After that, the marker turns to ‘*’ and the vertical lines get broken. (That’s just because it’s mostly the first one that matters when you’re munging your queue.)

So the patch named “backtrace” conflicts with the earlier “algorithm” patch, as well as the even earlier “bug-642054-js_MapPCToLineNumber” and others. The “M-reentr” patch only touches the same stuff as “bug-642054-rwreentrant” (not surprising, since “M-…” is my notation for a patch that needs to be folded into an earlier patch.) “system-libunwind” doesn’t conflict with anything earlier in the queue, and so can be freely reordered in the series file to anywhere earlier than where it is now — but note that several later patches touch the same stuff as it does. (It happens to be a patch to js/src/configure.in.)

Useful? Not very. But it was kinda fun to write and I find myself running it occasionally just to see what it shows, so I feel the entertainment value was worth the small investment of time. Though now I’m tempted to enhance it by checking for collisions in line ranges, not just in the files…

I suppose I could make a mercurial extension out of it, but that’d require porting it from Perl to Python, which is more trouble than it’s worth. (Yes, I still use Perl as my preferred language for whipping things together. Even though I dislike the syntax for nested data structures, I very much like the feature set, and it’s still the best language I’ve found for these sorts of things. So phbbbttt!)

Inspired by some silliness on #developers:

<jgilbert>	well that was an hg adventure
<dholbert>	$ hg adventure
You are in a twisty maze of passageways, all alike...
<cpeterson>	$ hg look
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
<hub>		$ hg doctor
How can I help you?

I thought I’d stick to actual hg commands, and came up with:

You see a small hole leading to a dark passageway.
820:21d40b86ae37$ echo "enter passageway" > action
820:21d40b86ae37$ hg commit
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
821:0121fb347e18$ echo "look" > action
821:0121fb347e18$ hg commit
** You have been eaten by a grue **
822:b09217a7bbc1$ hg backout 822
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
821:0121fb347e18$ hg backout 821
You see a small hole leading to a dark passageway.
820:21d40b86ae37$ echo "turn on flashlight" > action
820:21d40b86ae37$ hg commit
Your flashlight is now on.
824:44a4e4bf5f0e$ hg merge 821
Your light reveals a forking passageway leading north and south.

Kinda makes you think, huh? Time reversal games became popular semi-recently (eg Braid). Maybe the fad is over now; I’m *way* out of date.

But did any of them allow you to branch and merge? Push and pull from your friends’ distributed repos? Bisect to find the point where you unknowingly did something that prevented ever winning the game and either continue from there, merge a backout of that action, or create a new branch by splicing that action out?

It’s a whole new genre! It’ll be… um… fun.

(I’ll go back to work now)