[llvm-dev] Proposing a llvm-patch helper script in-tree to create/apply patches without arc

[Florian Hahn via llvm-dev]

> On Jan 20, 2020, at 22:09, David Tellenbach <david.tellenbach at me.com> wrote:
> 
> Hi,
> 
> although I think making the arcanist workflow more accessible is an excellent idea I'm not entirely sure if providing a custom script is the best solution (yet).
> 
> A lower hanging fruit would be to have a good and comprehensive documentation, ideally including some example workflows, for using arcanist with LLVM. While the Phabricator documentation on arcanist is quite helpful for getting started it's not very detailed. Our own docs on the topic are basically non-existent.
> 
> The downsides of providing a custom script are obvious: Someone has to write it and someone has to maintain it. Moreover I don't think that arcanist is so complicated that a custom script would be a huge improvement (you'd have to read the documentation of the new tool anyway).
> 

I agree, improving the documentation will also go a long way! But there’s still the PHP issue that some people run into. Also, the script would be much more focused, which also should make —help more useful than arc’s, which shows you the 20+ different commands.

To clarify, I am not proposing to get rid of arc or switching the docs to the custom script. I’d just like to highlight that writing and maintaining such a script for the most common uses cases should not be much work, in the grand scheme of things. If people are interested in collaborating on such a script, I think the burden of adding it would be quite low.