Re: Replacing Link trailers

[Doug Anderson <dianders@chromium.org>]

Hi,

On Mon, Oct 13, 2025 at 1:59 PM Vlastimil Babka <vbabka@suse.cz> wrote:
>
> >> All the other arguments seem just disingenuous in that they literally
> >> give less useful information than "b4 dig" does.
> >
> > Wow, I hadn't heard of "b4 dig" and it doesn't appear to have landed
> > yet. ...but I searched and it was easy to find a reference. I'll check
> > it out. Oh, it's using AI. I guess my suggestion that we should use AI
> > to solve this problem was more on point than I realized. ;-) ;-) ;-)
> >
> > OK, I found Sasha's RFC [1].
>
> You found the wrong one. See this one:
>
> https://lore.kernel.org/all/20251010-muscular-camel-of-acumen-00eeaf@lemur/
>
> But if your point was to demonstrate how searching for a subject can lead to
> the wrong outcome, good job :)

Crap, that's funny. Yeah, all the top Google searches for "b4 dig" are
all for Sasha's tool. Konstantin's patch, while landed, isn't in the
most recent "versioned" b4 release (v0.14.3), so I didn't see it.
...and yes, it does somewhat prove the point that just trying to match
on "subject" can be dangerous. I've run into the issue where lore
pages don't seem to be consistently findable in Google in the past and
I guess it struck again...

OK, so Konstantin's version at least solves my problem of getting a
mailing list post from a commit hash, which is good. It uses "git
patch-id" which is a really great/exact solution when it works. It
won't always work, of course. Sometimes maintainers/committers find
merge conflicts when we try to apply and, if folks are feeling
generous and it's easy, folks won't request a re-send. That messes up
patch-id.

Luckily "b4 dig" falls back to subject matching. As per above, that's
not always perfect but probably works more than 95% of the time?

So I guess given the correct pointer to "b4 dig", it seems like a
pretty workable solution for me. It will fail/be wrong sometimes, but
probably less often than I had to deal with a maintainer that didn't
put "Link:" tags in the past. I could still wish that maintainers
could still put "Link:" tags to really document where they obtained
the patch from, but oh well, one can't have everything.

-Doug