Re: [Ksummit-discuss] crediting bug reports and fixes folded into original patch

Konstantin Ryabitsev
2020-12-03T19:18:22Z

On Thu, Dec 03, 2020 at 08:55:54AM -0800, Joe Perches wrote:
> Perhaps automate a mechanism to capture that information as
> git notes for the patches when applied.

Git notes have a limited usefulness for this -- they are indeed part of
the repository, but they aren't replicated unless someone does a
--mirror clone (or specifically fetches refs/notes/*). If the goal is to
improve visibility for contributors, then putting this info into a git
note will hardly make more difference than providing a Link: that
someone has to follow to a list archival service.

I can offer the following proposal:

- kernel.org already monitors all mailing lists that are archived on
lore.kernel.org for the purposes of pull request tracking
(pr-tracker-bot).
- in the near future, we will add a separate process that will
auto-explode all pull requests into individual patches and add them
to a separate public-inbox archive (think of it as another
transparency log, since pull requests are transient and opaque).

We can additionally:

- identify all Link: and Message-Id: entries in commit messages,
retrieve the threads they refer to, and archive them as part of the
same (or adjacent) transparency log.

This offers an improvement over the status quo, because if
lore.kernel.org becomes unavailable, someone would have to have access
to all backend archive repositories it is currently tracking in order to
be able to reconstitute relevant conversations -- whereas with this
change, it should be sufficient to just have the copy of the
transparency log to have a fully self-contained high-relevancy archive
of both individual commits and conversations that happened around them.

I'm just not sure if this will help with the subject of the
conversation, or if it does not serve the goal of recognizing developer
contributions by making them more visible.

-K