Re: Replacing Link trailers

[<dan.j.williams@intel.com>]

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.

Towards this end I drafted a b4 feature:

http://lore.kernel.org/20251014071530.3665691-1-dan.j.williams@intel.com

Note I still think 'b4 dig; is needed for other use cases, but a git
note in my local tree restores my workflow.