Re: Replacing Link trailers

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

Greg KH wrote:
> 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.)

Agree. I still expect 'b4 dig' is needed for that case, and I think
per-subsystem notes can help it along. I.e. part of what it can do is
walk a Link: in a pull / merge request to find the source git tree and
then see if that tree has notes. Otherwise, it can fallback to
attempting patch-id matching, or vice-versa, attempt patch-id first and
fallback to trying to find notes.