Re: Link: tag and links to submission and reports (was: Re: [GIT pull] core/urgent for v5.18-rc6)

From: Michael Ellerman <mpe@ellerman.id.au>
To: Borislav Petkov <bp@alien8.de>, Thorsten Leemhuis <linux@leemhuis.info>
Cc: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>,
	Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>,
	Zhangfei Gao <zhangfei.gao@foxmail.com>,
	Fenghua Yu <fenghua.yu@intel.com>,
	Jean-Philippe Brucker <jean-philippe@linaro.org>,
	Jacob Pan <jacob.jun.pan@linux.intel.com>,
	Dave Hansen <dave.hansen@intel.com>,
	Linux Kernel Mailing List <linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org>,
	the arch/x86 maintainers <x86@kernel.org>
Subject: Re: Link: tag and links to submission and reports (was: Re: [GIT pull] core/urgent for v5.18-rc6)
Date: Wed, 11 May 2022 23:48:11 +1000	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <877d6s89k4.fsf@mpe.ellerman.id.au> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <Ynt1z0eZ19eMqp8I@zn.tnic>

Borislav Petkov <bp@alien8.de> writes:
> On Tue, May 10, 2022 at 01:27:54PM +0200, Thorsten Leemhuis wrote:
>> Many thx for reminding people about the tag.  FWIW, that's a problem in
>> a lot or subsystems and makes my regression tracking efforts hard, as my
>> tracking bot relies on the 'Link:' tag. If it's missing I thus have to
>> manually search if patches were posted or committed to fix a regression,
>> which makes the tracking hard and annoying. :-/
>
> Here's my experience with the Link thing:
>
> So it is trivial to take the Message-ID and turn it into a link tag and
> our automation does that.
>
> - Now, it is not a problem when that link tag points to a patch which is
> part of the thread which contains the initial bug report - you just go
> up-thread.
>
> - If the link tag points to a patch which is version N and it is the
> version which passed all review and gets committed, it is a bit harder
> to find the previous versions and find the whole discussion how it all
> arrived at version N. You can search by the Subject, ofc, which, if it
> hasn't been changed, will give you the previous threads. And so on ...
>
> - The problem is when the discussion happened somewhere and the patch
> got submitted separately. I can't think of a good way to automate
> that so we have to pay attention and fix the link tag by hand and add
> the relevant one. And I try to do that when I'm especially awake when
> applying the patch.

That doesn't scale though, it puts more work on maintainers, who already
don't have enough time.

The *submitter* should be putting all the relevant info in the patch,
including any links to other discussions, previous versions etc. etc.

Then the maintainer can automatically add the "Link:" tag pointing to
the submission, and everything is there in the archive.

One advantage of linking back to the original submission is that if the
patch doesn't have all the relevant info, anyone can post replies adding
context or linking to other places, even after the patch has been
committed.

cheers