Having produced a nice little series of 124 patches (yes, really), I recently had to find out what patch introduced a problem for distcheck to pass. Since distcheck takes quite some time to execute, I want to make as few runs as possible.

In Git, there is the bisect command that can be used to perform bisection testing of a series of patches, but quilt does not have anything like that, so to simplify my job, I needed to implement that for quilt.

I started by defining a shell function that did the actual test, and returned the result.

do_test () {
    echo -n "running distcheck..."
    make -j6 distcheck >/dev/null 2>&1
}

After that, I added code to add values for some variables used and to process options to the script. The script supports two options: --lower and …