Re: Link trailers revisited (was Re: [GIT PULL] io_uring fix for 6.17-rc5)

[Konstantin Ryabitsev <konstantin@linuxfoundation.org>]

On Tue, Sep 09, 2025 at 08:35:18AM -0600, Jens Axboe wrote:
> >> On a global scale, that's quite a number of saved mailing list archive searches.
> > 
> > +1 FWIW. I also started slapping the links on all patches in a series,
> > even if we apply with a merge commit. I don't know of a good way with
> > git to "get to the first parent merge" so scanning the history to find
> > the link in the cover letter was annoying me :(
> 
> Like I've tried to argue, I find them useful too. But after this whole
> mess of a thread, I killed -l from my scripts. I do think it's a mistake
> and it seems like the only reason to remove them is that Linus expects
> to find something at the end of the link rainbow and is often
> disappointed, and that annoys him enough to rant about it.
> 
> I know some folks downstream of me on the io_uring side find them useful
> too, because they've asked me several times to please remember to ensure
> my own self-applied patches have the link as well. For those, I tend to
> pick or add them locally rather than use b4 for it, which is why they've
> never had links.
> 
> As far as I can tell, only two things have been established here:
> 
> 1) Linus hates the Link tags, except if they have extra information
> 2) Lots of other folks find them useful
> 
> and hence we're at a solid deadlock here.

I did suggest that provenance links use the patch.msgid.link subdomain. This
should clearly mark it as the source of the patch and not any other
discussion. I think this is a reasonable compromise that will only mildly
annoy Linus but let subsystems relying on these links continue to use them.

-K