{hg, git} bisect + portage

Recently I did stumble into a annoying bug in awesome WM. Devs asked me to do git bisect in order to help fixing it, but it appeared that simple compiling and running the binary wasn’t enough for reproducing it, so I though a bit and managed to couple bisecting and Portage.

I assume you know what is *bisect* (and if not, but want to, see the documentation), so basically what you need is to emerge package in question from certain changeset (and then test it for bug) after running ${your-dvcs-here} bisect. Here’s how I did it:

#!/bin/sh
rm -rf /tmp/awesome*
cp -rp ~sterkrig/tmp/awesome /tmp/awesome-3.4.999
rm -rf /tmp/awesome-3.4.999/.*
cd /tmp
tar cjf awesome-3.4.999.tar.bz2 awesome-3.4.999
mv -f awesome-3.4.999.tar.bz2 /usr/portage/distfiles
chown portage:portage /usr/portage/distfiles/awesome-3.4.999.tar.bz2
chmod 664 /usr/portage/distfiles/awesome-3.4.999.tar.bz2
ebuild --force /usr/local/portage/x11-wm/awesome/awesome-3.4.999.ebuild manifest
emerge awesome
cd ~

Let me explain what does it do:

• we’ll treat git checkouts as awesome 3.4.999 (bisecting between 3.4.4 and 3.4.5), it really doesn’t matter;

• sources are copied to other location, .git gets removed, and tar creates tarball similar to those of „official“ releases;

• next thing is to update manifest for our ebuild (it’s just a copy of awesome-3.4.5.ebuild from the tree) and emerge it

Happy bisecting!

P.S. And my bug was fixed three days after report. And nobody had noted it, hehe.