Re: Semantics of change IDs (Re: Gerrit, GitButler, and Jujutsu projects collaborating on change-id commit footer)

From: Konstantin Ryabitsev <konstantin@linuxfoundation.org>
Date: Apr 11, 2025, 16:38 UTC
Message-ID: <20250411-arboreal-ultra-dachshund-f34a54@lemur>
In-Reply-To: <20250411154839.GC648081@mit.edu>

On Fri, Apr 11, 2025 at 11:48:39AM -0400, Theodore Ts'o wrote:

Show 7 quoted lines

> On Thu, Apr 10, 2025 at 09:18:56AM -0700, Junio C Hamano wrote:
> > Thanks to the "cover for iteration N is a direct response for
> > iteration N-1" and "cover is marked as [PATCH 0/$n]" conventions,
> 
> Even if the cover for iteration N isn't a reply-to the cover for
> interation N-1, b4 will search based on the subject line for a cover
> letter with higher version number, and this mostly works.

Note, that we try to use the series change-id for this, if we find it. We only fall back to matching by subject (+author) if that's not present.

Show 9 quoted lines

> My one (admittedly minor) pain point is where someone replies to a
> patch series with something like "you should really also fix FOO", and
> then someone replies with a single patch (without a cover letter,
> possibly created with git; possibly not) that addresses issue FOO.
> 
> This can confuse "b4 am -c" into thinking that the patch to address
> FOO was in fact a newer version of the patch being reviewed.  It's not
> a big deal; I can deal with this manually.  But having a patch set ID
> would help with this.

I'm not sure there's ever going to be a clear "do what I mean" solution here. We try to pick the most common course of action in such case, which is to assume that it's a quick followup bugfix for the patch.

> I'd also love if lore.kernel.org and maybe b4 also had an automatic
> way to get at the older versions of the patch series, and the patch
> set ID would help with the automation.

You can, for patches sent with b4 that contain change-id. E.g.: https://lore.kernel.org/all/?q=changeid%3A20250313-a4-a5-reset-6696e5b18e10 https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/?q=changeid%3A20250313-try_with-cc9f91dd3b60

-K