Re: [kernel.org users] b4: encouraging using the cover letter in merge commits?

["Leon Romanovsky" <leon@kernel.org>]

On Mon, Dec 21, 2020 at 06:30:12PM -0300, Arnaldo Carvalho de Melo wrote:
> Em Mon, Dec 21, 2020 at 03:05:52PM -0400, Jason Gunthorpe escreveu:
> > On Sat, Dec 19, 2020 at 09:21:26AM -0800, Jakub Kicinski wrote:
> > > On Sat, 19 Dec 2020 09:03:36 -0800 James Bottomley wrote:
> > > > > I agree that the cover letter is useful more often than not and
> > > > > ideally it would be included in most cases. In netdev/bpf land the
> > > > > maintainers do this by always creating a merge commit when applying a
> > > > > multi-part series; here's Daniel applying one of mine, for instance:
> > > > >
> > > > > https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/netdev/net-next.git/commit/?id=4e083fdfa39db29bbc7725e229e701867d0da183
> > > > >
> > > > > I personally think this practice is pretty nice, and so I was hoping
> > > > > that supporting this workflow in b4 could be a way to encourage other
> > > > > maintainers to take up the practice as well :)
> > > >
> > > > I've got to say that creating a spurious merge for the cover letter
> > > > looks even more tortuous than creating an empty commit.  What
> > > > advantages does this have over the existing link tag practice which is
> > > > the one that we now use instead of the empty commit?
> > >
> > > May be a chicken and an egg problem in case of other subsystems.
> > >
> > > DaveM started creating those merge commits long before Links were
> > > a thing (let alone lore). That gave netdev developers the ability
> > > to provide a high level description of their work, reasons, goals
> > > in the cover letter, rather than one of the commit messages. For
> > > a series with changes finely split for ease of review it's often
> > > awkward to pick on which commit to put that information.
> > >
> > > Obviously the cover letter information may be made available via
> > > the Link, but there's obvious value in seeing the information in
> > > the repo, after all we don't replace commit messages with links.
>
> > My biggest problem with the cover letters is while the are in the
> > repository, someplace, I've never actually found one while hunting
> > around in the git history for clues, eg with 'git blame' or 'git log
> > log -p'
>
> Well, they don't get merged, this is the point of this thread :-\

In the netdev flow, the cover letters are merged.
See commit 28f53159e121 ("Merge branch 'vsock-add-flags-field-in-the-vsock-address'")

Thanks