Re: [Ksummit-discuss] Allowing something Change-Id (or something like it) in kernel commits

Jani Nikula
2019-08-28T09:25:48Z

On Wed, 28 Aug 2019, Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org> wrote:
> Then, when the "final" patch is added, the message id of that will be
> committed to the tree with the git hook that has been posted here, and
> then, if someone _REALLY_ wants to go look up past history of versions,
> they can see it all linked together in a nice pretty tree on
> lore.kernel.org or elsewhere.
>
> And really, this whole discussion has been for the VERY RARE case of
> when someone wants to do some code spelunking and try to figure out
> older versions of a patch history before it was committed and they don't
> feel like searching for the author's name instead. The HUGE majority of
> kernel developers never actually care about this as they don't have to
> do it.

For me the Link: tag is also a bit of audit trail, if you will. You can
easily check that the patch was actually posted for review on a public
list, and nobody sneaked it in without review. (And in drm/i915 we point
the Link: tag at our patchwork which also contains the CI results we
require.)

When I've found myself looking at the actual discussion or earlier patch
versions, it's almost always because the commit message falls short. A
link to the discussion should never be a replacement for a proper commit
message.

BR,
Jani.

--
Jani Nikula, Intel Open Source Graphics Center