Re: Replacing Link trailers

[Johannes Berg <johannes@sipsolutions.net>]

On Mon, 2025-10-13 at 08:25 -0400, Mathieu Desnoyers wrote:
> 
> Based on prior email discussions I've seen, I don't think Linus is
> convinced that tagging commits with a unique identifier brings value,

Well ... the way I read it, he's basically saying "it's useless to me so
you don't get to do it."

> whereas people actively developing and using tools based on a
> workflow that relies on patch revision tracking see a lot of value
> in this.

It's not just that, btw. We use it much for tracking the internal vs.
external version of a commit, which may differ due to kernel version
backports (e.g. added ifdefs or changes to additional files that aren't
upstream [yet]) that don't and sometimes shouldn't exist upstream.

All of this discussion pretends that whatever happens to a commit
outside the context of upstream is entirely irrelevant, but I suspect
that for many of us not purely tasked with 'develop upstream', but
rather 'enable device X' or similar don't have the luxury of ignoring
everything that happened before something went upstream.

There are already _so_ many roadblocks for contributing upstream. This
just adds another one. On the one hand, it's just another "small" one. I
don't believe it's as small as some people would like to believe, "b4
dig" will do nothing for "life before upstream" type usages.

Ultimately, this is yet another question of how much you want to make
life harder for contributors of all sorts. A link gives bug reporters
who somehow find a commit (e.g. bisect) more context to go on [1], gives
people working on things like hardware enabling that happens pre-
upstream (in a way) a lot of context, makes things faster in general,
etc.

And we're taking it away because literally *one* person thinks that it
adds irrelevant noise.

[1] Sure, they can use 'b4 dig' if you pretend they all already know to
use it.

</rant>

But seriously, why is this such a big thing? Linus is, in general,
asking literally everyone else much much more to suit his ways in the
kernel than "don't click the link if it starts with patch.msgid.link"
...

johannes