Re: Replacing Link trailers

[Greg KH <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org>]

On Tue, Oct 14, 2025 at 09:01:32AM -0700, dan.j.williams@intel.com wrote:
> Doug Anderson wrote:
> > Hi,
> > 
> > On Mon, Oct 13, 2025 at 4:53 AM James Bottomley
> > <James.Bottomley@hansenpartnership.com> wrote:
> > >
> > > There has been a lot of discussion on the tooling list about how the
> > > loss of link trailers has updated both tooling and triaging issues.
> > > Konstantin has proposed a tool to get around this, but while that's in
> > > development, I propose a discussion about making Link (or some
> > > alternative tag) into the pointer that would work for everyone.
> > 
> > A few random ideas to throw out there:
> > 
> > 1. Could we submit a change to the "git" tool to allow something like
> > the "Link" tag but hide it from the default settings? I'm thinking
> > something like how "git" only shows the Author/AuthorDate by default
> > until you say "--format=fuller" and then it also shows you the
> > Commit/CommitDate. Then we just tell Linus to keep the setting off and
> > everyone is happy.
> 
> A place to stash metadata that: stays out of mainline, is readily
> available to the subsystem maintainer and anyone interacting with the
> submaintainer's tree, git notes.

The "problem" with git notes is that for those of us working with the
"whole tree" at times, we would then have to go and dig across all
subsystems to try to find where the notes are.  So unless we have one
big "all the notes merged into one" tree somewhere, it's going to be
very unwieldy for many of us (i.e. all the distros/stable/release
people doing triage and bug reports.)

thanks,

greg k-h