Re: Replacing Link trailers

[Jani Nikula <jani.nikula@intel.com>]

On Thu, 16 Oct 2025, Greg KH <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org> wrote:
> While I appreciate the goal of keeping our changelogs "crap free", I
> still think that the "mindless Link: line" benefits far outweigh the
> lack of it being there, and forcing us to use additional tools and
> server resources, when doing our debugging and patch history tracing
> work, which almost all users of the kernel source tree end up doing.
>
> That single line is there for when we don't realize we are going to need
> it in the future, think of it as an insurance tax.  It's saved me tons
> of hours of time already in doing stable kernel work over the years, and
> I'm sure it has helped others out as well, as I'm not alone in doing
> backporting work to old codebases.

For the parts of the drm subsystem that follow the maintainer/committer
model, the Link: trailer is also part of an audit trail, if you will,
that only patches actually posted on the list get committed and pushed.

"Something like this was once posted somewhere" is nowhere near the same
as "this is the exact patch, as part of this series".

For i915 and xe, you'll additionally find the CI results for the exact
patch/series, and passing result is part of the merge criteria.

BR,
Jani.

-- 
Jani Nikula, Intel