Re: A little report on informal commit tag usage

Michael Paquier <michael(at)paquier(dot)xyz> writes:
> As mentioned on different threads, "Discussion" is the only one we had
> a strong agreement with. Could it be possible to consider things like
> Author, Reported-by, Reviewed-by or Backpatch-through for example and
> extend to that? The first three ones are useful for parsing the
> commit logs. The fourth one is handy so as there is no need to look
> at a full log tree with git log --graph or such, which is something I
> do from time to time to guess down to where a fix has been applied (I
> tend to avoid git_changelog).

FWIW, I'm one of the people who prefer prose for this. The backpatching
bit is a good example of why, because my log messages typically don't
just say "backpatch to 9.6" but something about why that was the cutoff.
For instance in 0ec3e13c6,

Per gripe from Ken Tanzer. Back-patch to 9.6. The issue exists
further back, but before 9.6 the code looks very different and it
doesn't actually know whether the "var" name matches anything,
so I desisted from trying to fix it.

I am in favor of trying to consistently mention that a patch is being
back-patched, rather than expecting people to rely on git metadata
to find that out. But I don't see that a rigid "Backpatch" tag format
makes anything easier there. If you need to know that mechanically,
git_changelog is way more reliable.

I'm also skeptical of the argument that machine-parseable Reported-by
and so forth are useful to anybody. Who'd use them, and for what?
Also, it's not always clear how to apply such a format to a real
situation --- eg, what do you do if the reporter is also the patch
author, or a co-author? I'm not excited about redundantly entering
somebody's name several times.

regards, tom lane