Chapter 13. Advanced uses of Mercurial Queues
Table of Contents
While it's easy to pick up straightforward uses of Mercurial Queues, use of a little discipline and some of MQ's less frequently used capabilities makes it possible to work in complicated development environments.
In this chapter, I will use as an example a technique I have used to manage the development of an Infiniband device driver for the Linux kernel. The driver in question is large (at least as drivers go), with 25,000 lines of code spread across 35 source files. It is maintained by a small team of developers.
While much of the material in this chapter is specific to Linux, the same principles apply to any code base for which you're not the primary owner, and upon which you need to do a lot of development.
The problem of many targets
The Linux kernel changes rapidly, and has never been internally stable; developers frequently make drastic changes between releases. This means that a version of the driver that works well with a particular released version of the kernel will not even compile correctly against, typically, any other version.
To maintain a driver, we have to keep a number of distinct versions of Linux in mind.
One target is the main Linux kernel development tree. Maintenance of the code is in this case partly shared by other developers in the kernel community, who make “drive-by” modifications to the driver as they develop and refine kernel subsystems.
We also maintain a number of “backports” to older versions of the Linux kernel, to support the needs of customers who are running older Linux distributions that do not incorporate our drivers. (To backport a piece of code is to modify it to work in an older version of its target environment than the version it was developed for.)
Finally, we make software releases on a schedule that is necessarily not aligned with those used by Linux distributors and kernel developers, so that we can deliver new features to customers without forcing them to upgrade their entire kernels or distributions.
Tempting approaches that don't work well
There are two “standard” ways to maintain a piece of software that has to target many different environments.
The first is to maintain a number of branches, each intended for a single target. The trouble with this approach is that you must maintain iron discipline in the flow of changes between repositories. A new feature or bug fix must start life in a “pristine” repository, then percolate out to every backport repository. Backport changes are more limited in the branches they should propagate to; a backport change that is applied to a branch where it doesn't belong will probably stop the driver from compiling.
The second is to maintain a single source tree filled with conditional statements that turn chunks of code on or off depending on the intended target. Because these “ifdefs” are not allowed in the Linux kernel tree, a manual or automatic process must be followed to strip them out and yield a clean tree. A code base maintained in this fashion rapidly becomes a rat's nest of conditional blocks that are difficult to understand and maintain.
Neither of these approaches is well suited to a situation where you don't “own” the canonical copy of a source tree. In the case of a Linux driver that is distributed with the standard kernel, Linus's tree contains the copy of the code that will be treated by the world as canonical. The upstream version of “my” driver can be modified by people I don't know, without me even finding out about it until after the changes show up in Linus's tree.
These approaches have the added weakness of making it difficult to generate well-formed patches to submit upstream.
In principle, Mercurial Queues seems like a good candidate to manage a development scenario such as the above. While this is indeed the case, MQ contains a few added features that make the job more pleasant.
Conditionally applying patches with guards
Perhaps the best way to maintain sanity with so many targets
is to be able to choose specific patches to apply for a given
situation. MQ provides a feature called “guards”
(which originates with quilt's guards
command) that does just this. To start off, let's create a
simple repository for experimenting in.
$hg qinit$hg qnew hello.patch$echo hello > hello$hg add hello$hg qrefresh$hg qnew goodbye.patch$echo goodbye > goodbye$hg add goodbye$hg qrefresh
This gives us a tiny repository that contains two patches that don't have any dependencies on each other, because they touch different files.
The idea behind conditional application is that you can “tag” a patch with a guard, which is simply a text string of your choosing, then tell MQ to select specific guards to use when applying patches. MQ will then either apply, or skip over, a guarded patch, depending on the guards that you have selected.
A patch can have an arbitrary number of guards; each one is positive (“apply this patch if this guard is selected”) or negative (“skip this patch if this guard is selected”). A patch with no guards is always applied.
Controlling the guards on a patch
The qguard command lets you determine which guards should apply to a patch, or display the guards that are already in effect. Without any arguments, it displays the guards on the current topmost patch.
$hg qguardgoodbye.patch: unguarded
To set a positive guard on a patch, prefix the name of the
guard with a “+”.
$hg qguard +foo$hg qguardgoodbye.patch: +foo
To set a negative guard
on a patch, prefix the name of the guard with a
“-”.
$hg qguard hello.patch -quuxhg qguard: option -u not recognized hg qguard [-l] [-n] -- [PATCH] [+GUARD]... [-GUARD]... set or print guards for a patch Guards control whether a patch can be pushed. A patch with no guards is always pushed. A patch with a positive guard ("+foo") is pushed only if the qselect command has activated it. A patch with a negative guard ("-foo") is never pushed if the qselect command has activated it. With no arguments, print the currently active guards. With arguments, set guards for the named patch. NOTE: Specifying negative guards now requires '--'. To set guards on another patch: hg qguard -- other.patch +2.6.17 -stable options: -l --list list all patches and guards -n --none drop all guards use "hg -v help qguard" to show global options$hg qguard hello.patchhello.patch: unguarded
![[Note]](/support/figs/note.png)
Mercurial stores guards in the series file; the form in which they
are stored is easy both to understand and to edit by hand. (In
other words, you don't have to use the qguard command if you don't want
to; it's okay to simply edit the series file.)
$cat .hg/patches/serieshello.patch goodbye.patch #+foo
Selecting the guards to use
The qselect command determines which guards are active at a given time. The effect of this is to determine which patches MQ will apply the next time you run qpush. It has no other effect; in particular, it doesn't do anything to patches that are already applied.
With no arguments, the qselect command lists the guards currently in effect, one per line of output. Each argument is treated as the name of a guard to apply.
$hg qpop -apatch queue now empty$hg qselectno active guards$hg qselect foonumber of unguarded, unapplied patches has changed from 1 to 2$hg qselectfoo
In case you're interested, the currently selected guards are
stored in the guards file.
$cat .hg/patches/guardsfoo
We can see the effect the selected guards have when we run qpush.
$hg qpush -aapplying hello.patch applying goodbye.patch now at: goodbye.patch
A guard cannot start with a
“+” or
“-” character. The name of a
guard must not contain white space, but most other characters
are acceptable. If you try to use a guard with an invalid name,
MQ will complain:
$hg qselect +fooabort: guard '+foo' starts with invalid character: '+'
Changing the selected guards changes the patches that are applied.
$hg qselect quuxnumber of guarded, applied patches has changed from 0 to 1$hg qpop -apatch queue now empty$hg qpush -aapplying hello.patch skipping goodbye.patch - guarded by ['+foo'] now at: hello.patch
You can see in the example below that negative guards take precedence over positive guards.
$hg qselect foo barnumber of unguarded, unapplied patches has changed from 0 to 1$hg qpop -apatch queue now empty$hg qpush -aapplying hello.patch applying goodbye.patch now at: goodbye.patch
MQ's rules for applying patches
The rules that MQ uses when deciding whether to apply a patch are as follows.
If the patch has any negative guard that matches any currently selected guard, the patch is skipped.
If the patch has any positive guard that matches any currently selected guard, the patch is applied.
If the patch has positive or negative guards, but none matches any currently selected guard, the patch is skipped.
Trimming the work environment
In working on the device driver I mentioned earlier, I don't apply the patches to a normal Linux kernel tree. Instead, I use a repository that contains only a snapshot of the source files and headers that are relevant to Infiniband development. This repository is 1% the size of a kernel repository, so it's easier to work with.
I then choose a “base” version on top of which the patches are applied. This is a snapshot of the Linux kernel tree as of a revision of my choosing. When I take the snapshot, I record the changeset ID from the kernel repository in the commit message. Since the snapshot preserves the “shape” and content of the relevant parts of the kernel tree, I can apply my patches on top of either my tiny repository or a normal kernel tree.
Normally, the base tree atop which the patches apply should be a snapshot of a very recent upstream tree. This best facilitates the development of patches that can easily be submitted upstream with few or no modifications.
Dividing up the series
file
I categorise the patches in the series file into a number of logical
groups. Each section of like patches begins with a block of
comments that describes the purpose of the patches that
follow.
The sequence of patch groups that I maintain follows. The ordering of these groups is important; I'll describe why after I introduce the groups.
The “accepted” group. Patches that the development team has submitted to the maintainer of the Infiniband subsystem, and which he has accepted, but which are not present in the snapshot that the tiny repository is based on. These are “read only” patches, present only to transform the tree into a similar state as it is in the upstream maintainer's repository.
The “rework” group. Patches that I have submitted, but that the upstream maintainer has requested modifications to before he will accept them.
The “pending” group. Patches that I have not yet submitted to the upstream maintainer, but which we have finished working on. These will be “read only” for a while. If the upstream maintainer accepts them upon submission, I'll move them to the end of the “accepted” group. If he requests that I modify any, I'll move them to the beginning of the “rework” group.
The “in progress” group. Patches that are actively being developed, and should not be submitted anywhere yet.
The “backport” group. Patches that adapt the source tree to older versions of the kernel tree.
The “do not ship” group. Patches that for some reason should never be submitted upstream. For example, one such patch might change embedded driver identification strings to make it easier to distinguish, in the field, between an out-of-tree version of the driver and a version shipped by a distribution vendor.
Now to return to the reasons for ordering groups of patches
in this way. We would like the lowest patches in the stack to
be as stable as possible, so that we will not need to rework
higher patches due to changes in context. Putting patches that
will never be changed first in the series file serves this
purpose.
We would also like the patches that we know we'll need to modify to be applied on top of a source tree that resembles the upstream tree as closely as possible. This is why we keep accepted patches around for a while.
The “backport” and “do not ship”
patches float at the end of the series file. The backport patches
must be applied on top of all other patches, and the “do
not ship” patches might as well stay out of harm's
way.
Maintaining the patch series
In my work, I use a number of guards to control which patches are to be applied.
“Accepted” patches are guarded with
accepted. I enable this guard most of the time. When I'm applying the patches on top of a tree where the patches are already present, I can turn this patch off, and the patches that follow it will apply cleanly.Patches that are “finished”, but not yet submitted, have no guards. If I'm applying the patch stack to a copy of the upstream tree, I don't need to enable any guards in order to get a reasonably safe source tree.
Those patches that need reworking before being resubmitted are guarded with
rework.For those patches that are still under development, I use
devel.A backport patch may have several guards, one for each version of the kernel to which it applies. For example, a patch that backports a piece of code to 2.6.9 will have a
2.6.9guard.
This variety of guards gives me considerable flexibility in determining what kind of source tree I want to end up with. For most situations, the selection of appropriate guards is automated during the build process, but I can manually tune the guards to use for less common circumstances.
The art of writing backport patches
Using MQ, writing a backport patch is a simple process. All such a patch has to do is modify a piece of code that uses a kernel feature not present in the older version of the kernel, so that the driver continues to work correctly under that older version.
A useful goal when writing a good backport patch is to
make your code look as if it was written for the older version
of the kernel you're targeting. The less obtrusive the patch,
the easier it will be to understand and maintain. If you're
writing a collection of backport patches to avoid the
“rat's nest” effect of lots of
#ifdefs (hunks of source code that are only
used conditionally) in your code, don't introduce
version-dependent #ifdefs into the patches.
Instead, write several patches, each of which makes
unconditional changes, and control their application using
guards.
There are two reasons to divide backport patches into a
distinct group, away from the “regular” patches
whose effects they modify. The first is that intermingling the
two makes it more difficult to use a tool like the patchbomb extension to automate the
process of submitting the patches to an upstream maintainer.
The second is that a backport patch could perturb the context
in which a subsequent regular patch is applied, making it
impossible to apply the regular patch cleanly
without the earlier backport patch
already being applied.
Useful tips for developing with MQ
Organising patches in directories
If you're working on a substantial project with MQ, it's not difficult to accumulate a large number of patches. For example, I have one patch repository that contains over 250 patches.
If you can group these patches into separate logical categories, you can if you like store them in different directories; MQ has no problems with patch names that contain path separators.
Viewing the history of a patch
If you're developing a set of patches over a long time, it's a good idea to maintain them in a repository, as discussed in the section called “Managing patches in a repository”. If you do so, you'll quickly discover that using the hg diff command to look at the history of changes to a patch is unworkable. This is in part because you're looking at the second derivative of the real code (a diff of a diff), but also because MQ adds noise to the process by modifying time stamps and directory names when it updates a patch.
However, you can use the extdiff extension, which is bundled
with Mercurial, to turn a diff of two versions of a patch into
something readable. To do this, you will need a third-party
package called patchutils
[web:patchutils]. This provides a command
named interdiff, which shows the
differences between two diffs as a diff. Used on two versions
of the same diff, it generates a diff that represents the diff
from the first to the second version.
You can enable the extdiff extension in the usual way,
by adding a line to the extensions section of your
~/.hgrc.
[extensions] extdiff =
The interdiff command expects to be
passed the names of two files, but the extdiff extension passes the program
it runs a pair of directories, each of which can contain an
arbitrary number of files. We thus need a small program that
will run interdiff on each pair of files in
these two directories. This program is available as hg-interdiff in the examples directory of the
source code repository that accompanies this book.
With the hg-interdiff
program in your shell's search path, you can run it as
follows, from inside an MQ patch directory:
hg extdiff -p hg-interdiff -r A:B my-change.patch
Since you'll probably want to use this long-winded command
a lot, you can get hgext to
make it available as a normal Mercurial command, again by
editing your ~/.hgrc.
[extdiff] cmd.interdiff = hg-interdiff
This directs hgext to
make an interdiff command available, so you
can now shorten the previous invocation of extdiff to something a
little more wieldy.
hg interdiff -r A:B my-change.patch
The extdiff extension is
useful for more than merely improving the presentation of MQ
patches. To read more about it, go to the section called “Flexible diff support with the extdiff extension”.
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