Replacing a single patch in a series to reduce review overhead

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Assessment

Difficulty
4/5
Estimated time
3-5 days
Newbie friendliness
35/100
Issue type
Feature
Clarity
Mostly clear
Activity status
Stale
Tech stack
python
Domain
backend

Research direction

Start by tracing how Patchwork parses email headers and associates patches with series, then review the linked libc-alpha thread for the replacement case. The change is complete when the standard Supersedes or Obsoletes header can identify a patch replacement and the dependent automatic test framework recognizes the updated series.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

It is reasonably common that a small error in a single patch in a long series can be fixed with minimal effort. In that case, resubmitting the series is a huge, unnecessary overhead on reviewers.

For myself, I generally tend to submit such patches with a header like:

[PATCH v5.1 10/12] ...

... as a reply to (In-Reply-To: set to), in this case, [PATCH v5 10/12].

Patchwork does not recognize this pattern, and automatic test framework that depend on it will not operate.

Assuming that recognizing this pattern automagically is not practical, the standard email header "Supersedes:" (alias "Obsoletes:") could be supported to indicate that a patch is intended to replace a previous version in a series.

As one concrete example, see this email thread:

https://inbox.sourceware.org/libc-alpha/20250514221405.471472-13-hpa@zytor.com/

In this case the patch being replaced is 12/12.

Dominant language
Python
Stars
317
Forks
91
PR merge metrics
No merged PRs in 30d

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  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

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