Re: Linking topic merges to mailing list threads

From: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Date: Oct 2, 2024, 23:34 UTC
Message-ID: <20241002233436.GA3455554@coredump.intra.peff.net>
In-Reply-To: <20241002225057.M796260@dcvr>

On Wed, Oct 02, 2024 at 10:50:57PM +0000, Eric Wong wrote:

Show 13 quoted lines

> Emily Shaffer <nasamuffin@google.com> wrote:
> > Hi all,
> > 
> > We've been wanting to gather metrics on Git's code review process -
> > how long it takes from first contact on list to merge, how many
> > iterations are needed, time between iterations, etc. One missing link
> > is the actual merge time in `next` and `master` - a human can infer
> > the link between the patch and the mailing list thread, but it's more
> > challenging for a script to do it.
> 
> Searching by commit titles as a phrase against email subject (`s:')
> can probably make it easy w/o having to look up amlog or explicitly
> keep track of human-unmemorizable metadata such as Message-IDs.

I do that a lot myself, but it sometimes get tripped up when people put patches inline, like:

  > blah blah blah

  Yes, good idea. Maybe like this:

  -- >8 --
  foo: frobnicate the bar

  Etc...

In that case you have to do an actual body search. I usually find these with phrase searches in the body text (I'm usually using notmuch, not public-inbox, but I think the same would be true). Of course it may also find more false positives, but usually they're from the same thread anyway.

Very occasionally somebody posts a patch snippet and Junio writes a commit message that never even hits the list, but that's pretty rare these days. :)

-Peff