Re: [Ksummit-discuss] [TOPIC] Encouraging more reviewers

[Li Zefan <lizefan@huawei.com>]

On 2014/5/30 1:41, Greg KH wrote:
> On Thu, May 29, 2014 at 05:28:11PM +0800, Li Zefan wrote:
>> On 2014/5/29 5:32, Thomas Gleixner wrote:
>>> On Wed, 28 May 2014, Mark Brown wrote:
>>>
>>>> On Wed, May 28, 2014 at 05:44:41PM +0000, Luck, Tony wrote:
>>>>
>>>>>> There's a world of difference between thanking people for review and a
>>>>>> detailed account of all the changes made in every single iteration of
>>>>>> the review.
>>>>
>>>>> This is already covered in Documentation/SubmittingPatches. Quoting
>>>>> lines 585-592 (see last sentence):
>>>>
>>>> Right, but Daniel is proposing lifting that above the --- and including
>>>> it in git.
>>>
>>> What you really want is:
>>>
>>> Link: https://lkml.kernel.org/r/MESSAGE_ID_OF_PATCH
>>>
>>> It's way more useful than any of the v1-n writeups, which are most of
>>> the time just a completely waste of electrons. Even if written well,
>>> without the actual review context they are pretty pointless.
>>>
>>
>> A QA asked me about kernel development process. One of his question is,
>> he found some valuable information in the discussion of the patch often
>> won't be added to the changelog, so providing the commit how to find
>> the discussion?
> 
> A research group has created a tool that takes a given git commit, finds
> the mailing list discussion for that patch.  It was posted to lkml 6 or
> so months ago, you should point them at that tool if they want to do
> this.
> 

Thanks for the information!

So I believe not many people know about that tool and I have to try it
out to see how well it works.

I think many people want to do this, and the link tag is better than
an out-of-tree tool, which people just don't know about.

We may also use the link tag for stable commits. So for those commits
that were not backported automatically but requested specifically,
people can easily find the history about why it got merged.

If it were there, our previous backporting work for 3.4.x would have
been eaiser.