On Wed, Aug 27, 2025 at 06:29:50PM -0700, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> On Wed, 27 Aug 2025 at 17:41, Konstantin Ryabitsev
> <konstantin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> >
> > I'm not sure what you mean. The Link: trailer is added when the maintainer
> > pulls in the series into their tree.
>
> That's my point. Adding it to the commit at that point is entirely
> useless, because
>
> (a) that email doesn't have the *reason* for the patch (or rather, if
> it does, then the link to the email is pointless, since the *real*
> reason was mentioned already)
>From a maintainer's perspective, the reason why I keep the link in is
because I'm dumb-ass lazy. My workflow involves looking at patchwork,
cutting-and-pasting the Message-Id, and then passing it to b4.
Looking through a 20 patch series to figure out which one rates a
Link: trailer, and which one doesn't is a pain in the *ss, and in the
off-chance that there *is* a meaningful and deep discussion, it would
be nice to be able to capture it. But it might be in patch #4; or
patch #12; or patches #14 and #15. Also, there might be an extended
conversation thread in the patch series description (patch #0) and it
would be useful to be able to get a link to it.
So here's a set of feature requests for b4.
(a) It would be cool(tm), if there was a way for b4 to automatically
detect whether or not there was a reply to a patch at the time that
"b4 am" is run; if there is, to include the patch series. If there
isn't an e-mail reply, skip the the Link: trailer.
(b) In the case of a patch series, it would be useful to include some
kind of trailer indicating that a group of patches are logically
grouped together (maybe a patch-series: that has the message id to
the the series header, or the first patch if there is no patch #0)
--- because one of the other ways that I figure out that a series
of commits are part of a patch series is by looking at the Link:
field since if the messages are generated using "git send-email"
it's usually obvious from the message id. This has also come up
from some of the folks who want this for their web-based review
systems. I don't care about that, but if it solves multiple use
cases at once, that's great.
(c) Include a link tag to the patch series description e-mail message
(if present) in the first commit of the patch series so it's
possible to read the patch #0 description of the patch series,
since otherwise this can get be hard to find in the git history.
(d) For bonus points, if there is a way to determine a link to the
previous versions of the patch series, it would be useful for to
incude link: tags to previous versions of the patch if and only if
there were e-mail comments to say, the v5, v12, and v27 versions
of the patch.
(e) If there is some way we can easily capture lore.kernel.org URL for
the vN-1 version of the patch series in the vN commit description
header, in "b4 prep" that would be *excellent*. I don't think it
can do this today, but if it can, can we make sure it's defaulted
to on, and then we should **really** market the heck out of b4
prep?
The bottom line is I'd love to make Linus less cranky; but I'd also love
it if I didn't have to do the extra work by hand. :-) Because if I do
have to do it by hand, I will probably screw up, and my preference has
been to err on the side of having the link, so it's there when I'm
having to code code archeology --- even if most of the time it's not
strictly speaking necessary.
Cheers,
- Ted
