Chris Ball

I took over maintaining the Linux kernel’s MMC/SD/SDIO subsystem recently, and quickly found that I was spending too much time saving, applying and compile-testing submitted patches (and trying to remember which of these I’d done for a given patch). The following Emacs/Gnus function helps with that — with a single keypress when looking at a mail that contains a patch, it applies the patch to my git tree, runs the kernel’s “checkpatch” tool to check for common errors, and kicks off a compile test in the background. I’m not much of an elisp coder, so feel free to critique it if you can.

(defun apply-mmc-patch ()
    "Take a gnus patch: apply; compile-test; checkpatch."
    (interactive)
    (setq default-directory "/home/cjb/git/mmc/")
    (setq compilation-directory "/home/cjb/git/mmc/")
    ; First, apply the patch.
    (dvc-gnus-article-apply-patch 2)
    ; Run 'git format-patch', and save the filename.
    (let ((patchfile (dvc-run-dvc-sync
        'xgit (delq nil (list "format-patch" "-k" "-1"))
        :finished 'dvc-output-buffer-handler)))
      ; Compile the result.
      (compile "make modules")
      ; Now run checkpatch.
      (let ((exit-code (call-process "perl" nil nil nil
                     "scripts/checkpatch.pl"
                     patchfile)))
    (if (eq exit-code 0)
        (message "Checkpatch: OK")
      (message "Checkpatch: Failed")))))

(define-key gnus-summary-mode-map "A" 'apply-mmc-patch)