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

Doug Anderson
2019-08-28T21:00:20Z

Hi,

On Wed, Aug 28, 2019 at 1:47 PM Johannes Berg <johannes@sipsolutions.net> wrote:
>
> Hi Doug,
>
>
> > The actual Message-Id generated there was:
> >
> > 20190828132723.0.RFC.Ie6289f437ae533d7fcaddfcee9202f0e92c6b2b9@changeid
>
> When you post a patch with that type of message ID, why don't you
> already include a suitable archive Link: inside the patch posting?
>
> Then you don't have to rely on the maintainer to add the Link: tag when
> they apply the patch. Many (kernel) maintainers do now, and pre-adding
> the Link: tag means we maintainers should change our scripts to not
> duplicate the Link: tag, but if you have a predictable Message-Id and
> predictable archive then you ought to be able to already include link?

That might work, but a few issues:

1. I'd have to guess that the Link would be valid. Until the patch is
posted the Link is certainly not valid, so I'm basically adding to the
patch something that says "I _think_ you'd be able to find this patch
with this link". Seems a little sketchy.

2. The script would (presumably) want to look at where the patch was
mailed to and either generate different links or not generate a link
in some cases. Last I checked (maybe fixed now?) some mailing lists
weren't archived on lore.kernel.org and not everyone CCs LKML. If
nothing else the people using this script for posting patches to
U-Boot wouldn't want a Link to lore.kernel.org

3. The link is of limited usefulness until it lands in the kernel
tree, isn't it? If you found the patch on the mailing list before it
lands then presumably you don't need a link to the patch itself. A
link to previous versions could be useful, but I'm not trying to solve
that (I'm assuming that tooling would eventually be developed that
could use the Change-Id encoded in the Message-Id to help with this).

4. It feels like getting maintainers to add a "Link:" is a tractable
(even if difficult) problem. There are a finite number of maintainers
that can be told to do this instead of an infinite number of
submitters. Presumably maintainers already need to learn to add
"Link:" anyway since (even if I am surprised and lots of people adopt
my proposal) you'll never get 100% of submitters adding a "Link:" like
this.

-Doug