Re: b4 submit ready for beta testing

[Jason Gunthorpe <jgg@ziepe.ca>]

On Tue, Jul 19, 2022 at 03:59:49PM +0200, Maxime Ripard wrote:

> > I'm puzzled why people are saying this is non-standard, it is well
> > supported by git and works well with all the review and web tools. The
> > only missing bit in git is a git format-patch flag to process it
> > automatically into to the cover letter email.
> 
> So, I definitely haven't been around for as long as you, but I still
> have been using git daily for the last 15 years. It's literally the
> first time I'm hearing about someone using that workflow.

To be fair, I didn't encounter this until I started to have to work
with gerrit, maybe 5 years ago.

It seems common enough, eg I can find other communities using gerrit
documenting this methodology:

https://fabric-documentations.readthedocs.io/en/latest/Gerrit/best-practices.html#creating-a-cover-letter-for-a-topic

If you are working alone you can get by with tags or the branch
description, but as we discussed it really doesn't scale into a team
environment because the data falls outside the natural source control.

> I'm sure that it works great for you and others using that workflow, but
> it's far from widely used still. I wouldn't call it non-standard
> because, well, there's pretty much no standard when it comes to how you
> should use git, but if we're targeting outsiders we shouldn't go too far
> off the typical workflow.

I think this thread shows exactly that there is no typical workflow
here.

IMHO Konstantin shoul decide if the goal if this b4 feature is to
support everyone's unique idea of a work flow, or to implement a
reasonable broadly useful workflow that is simple to use and
understand.

And I think it is a legitimate point that it would be nice if 'git
format-email' could be taught to natively handle whatever cover-letter
storage b4 wants to use.

Jason