Re: Replacing Link trailers

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

On Wed, 2025-10-15 at 10:09 -0700, dan.j.williams@intel.com wrote:
> Greg KH wrote:
> > So unless we have one big "all the notes merged into one" tree
> > somewhere
> 
> ...circling back to say. Why *not* do this?
> 
> When Linus says:
> 
> > And maybe lore could even have particular indexing for the data you
> > are interested in if that helps.
> > 
> > In my experience, Konstantin has been very responsive when people
> > have
> > asked for those kinds of things (both b4 and lore).
> 
> ...why not a notes tree? Make a convention for subsystems to annotate
> notes updates in pull requests. Linus workflow does not change,
> mainline metadata unaffected, but pr-tracker-bot is enabled to update
> the central 'notes' tree.

I think part of the problem with notes is they're designed not to be
shared.  So there are lots of diverse internal uses for notes that
aren't just the annotations you're thinking of here, so when I push to
a notes tree, I'd likely have to filter and when I pull from it I
wouldn't necessarily want everyone else's notes ... it's like when you
forget to add --no-tags to a pull from someone else's tree and you get
a load of their internal tags that contaminates your internal tag pool.

>  This gives a path for subsystems to ship metadata that their
> downstreams care about.

Yes, but not all subsystems would care about everything even in this
notes driven annotations model ... so you either have to have filter on
pull or strict rules about what goes in, which then causes issues with
local notes uses.

That's not to say we can't make it work, but I think if something is
important enough to be global it should be part of the commit tree in
some form.

Regards,

James