Re: Replacing Link trailers

[James Bottomley <James.Bottomley@HansenPartnership.com>]

On Thu, 2025-10-16 at 14:51 +0200, Jiri Kosina wrote:
> On Thu, 16 Oct 2025, Mathieu Desnoyers wrote:
> 
> > The "Link:" tag is unfortunately a bag of holding for all sorts of
> > links.
> 
> That's indeed the case.
> 
> People are using Link: not only to refer to the actual msgid that was
> used to apply the patch , then there are links to all sorts of
> bugzillas, github pull requests, gitlab issue reports, ... and those
> definitely have completely different semantics.
> 
> Which is also why people sometimes seem to be talking past each
> other, because maintainers mostly see it as a primary tool to
> reference the email thread that was the source of the patch, while
> submitters often see it as a way to express "See also for random pile
> of other information regarding this".
> 
> But I think it's an important disctinction.

To repeat what I said here:
https://lore.kernel.org/ksummit/ef52db7e1d08eb03376fd9343c965aab4dc71ce5.camel@HansenPartnership.com/

---
I actually think this debate should be split into two
pieces:

   1. What completely automated thing do we need to help tools with
      tracking.  I think the message-id header would do that
   2. What mindful thing could maintainers add to a commit to give
      useful background information?

I think a lot of people want the former but Linus is asking for the
latter and Link: has previously tried to serve both purposes which lead
to the current dispute. I'm hoping splitting the discussion will
produce something better on both fronts.
---

Regards,

James