Re: [Ksummit-discuss] [TOPIC] Metadata addendum to git commit

[Johan Herland <johan@herland.net>]

On Thu, May 22, 2014 at 7:58 AM, Takashi Iwai <tiwai@suse.de> wrote:
>> From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>:
>> A good way forward to solve Iwai-san's original issue might be
>>
>>  * Establish the "Fixes:" mentioned above as a standard practice.
>>    Polishing Christian's interpret-trailers tool might be a good way
>>    to encourage developers to do so.
>>
>>  * Have an easy way for developers to scan incoming commits for
>>    these "Fixes:" footer, and record the reverse mapping locally, so
>>    that we can go from a commit whose brokenness is discovered later
>>    to the commit that fixes its breakage efficiently.  "notes" may
>>    be a good mechanism to implement this mapping, and we do not have
>>    to worry about sharing the notes trees among developers.
>>
>>  * The information is visible with "log --show-notes" if it is
>>    stored in local notes.  When an earlier commit that was later
>>    found to be broken is shown, the note that points at the commit
>>    that fixes it will be shown.
>>
>>  * Teach "bisect" to also take notice of this information, and
>>    temporarily cherry-pick while testing commits with fixes that
>>    were discovered later, in a way similar to what was suggested by
>>    Jiri Kosina in an earlier message.
>
> These sound like a good plan, indeed.
>
> But, one missing, and maybe often happening thing is: people forget to
> tag at the right time.  In the scenario above, if a maintainer forgets
> to add Fixes: tag in the fix commit, it's all gone?

Yes, unless you add it (using git-notes) as an annotation to the fix
commit, but then you're back to the (perceived) problem of sharing
those notes.

Alternatively, you would have to find a different mechanism for
developers to insert entries into their reverse mappings from
post-facto/missing "Fixes:" tags.


...Johan

-- 
Johan Herland, <johan@herland.net>
www.herland.net