Re: [RFC/PATCH 1/1] format-patch: add an option to record base tree info

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Feb 24, 2016, 06:30 UTC
Message-ID: <xmqqpovmmxhv.fsf@gitster.mtv.corp.google.com>
In-Reply-To: <20160224025519.GB16562@wfg-t540p.sh.intel.com>

Fengguang Wu <fengguang.wu@intel.com> writes:

Show 7 quoted lines

> The necessary lines for the robot are
>
>         base commit:
>         base patch-id:
> or
>         base tree-id:
>         base patch-id:

I will not repeat why a commit object name would be more appropriate than a tree object name here (please see my response to HPA).

Show 6 quoted lines

> The "base tree-id" will be useful if the submitted patchset is based
> on a public (maintainer) commit.
>
> The "base patch-id" will be useful if the submitted patchset is based
> on another patchset someone (likely the developer himself) posted to
> the mailing list.

Is there a database of in-flight patches indexed by their patch-ids with a large enough coverage (hopefully those who maintain such a database are using the --stable version of the patch-id for indexing the patches)? I am wondering how well this scales, especially if a well-known commit named by "base commit" needs to be checked out and then many in-flight patches identified by "base patch-id"s need to be applied on top of it, to prepare the tree-ish the patch being evaluated can be applied to.

This starts to sound more like something you would want to write in the cover letter, or the trailer block next to Signed-off-by: at the end of the first patch in the series. Or even after the mail signature at the very end of the message (incidentally that would probably minimize the damage to the Git codebase needed for this addition--you should be able to do this without touching anything other than builtin/log.c).