Re: Replacing Link trailers

[Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>]

On Wed, 15 Oct 2025 at 11:37, Konstantin Ryabitsev
<konstantin@linuxfoundation.org> wrote:
>>
> Git notes are fragile, they have important scalability problems (

Yeah, I don't think git notes are the answer - they are good for
purely *local* notes, but they just don't distribute well.

I think people would be a *lot* better off with b4 integration in
their workflow.

For example, I don't know how many people use git hooks. I personally
only do a couple: mainly I use them to do signature verification so
that I don't miss the "oh, somebody sent me pull request without a
signed tag".

I didn't always notice the lack of successful tag verification.

So I have a commit hook that makes it very obvious when I don't have a
key or when the tag was an unsigned one.

How about the people who love their link tags look at making them
*conscious*. That's what I hate about the current situation: I really
see a lot of completely useless tags because they've been added
mindlessly, and they are nothing but an annoyance.

And if people who have real workflows that use Link tags actually were
to add them consciously, I wouldn't hate them so much.

So for example, people have mentioned amending patches (although most
people have actually mentioned amending the commit *message*, which
doesn't change the patch ID), and that's where inserting - as comments
- the lore links for the original commit could be a good idea.

Look, you can have a .git/hooks/prepare-commit-msg script that looks
something like this:

  #!/bin/sh
  COMMIT_MSG_FILE=$1
  COMMIT_SOURCE=$2
  SHA1=$3
  b4 dig -c "$SHA1" 2>&1 | sed 's/^/# /' >> "$COMMIT_MSG_FILE"

And lo and behold: you'll find the 'b4 dig' output at the end of your
commit message as you start editing it.

(The above script is "tested" in that I verified that yes

Ok, so the above is a really minimal hook, but I hope it gives people
ideas of how they can make things like Link tags work in a *conscious*
model, not a "mindlessly add them" model.

It's really the "add a flag to a config file and forget it, and now
every commit you do has a link tag whether you thought about it or
not" that I dislike so much.

             Linus