Martin Fick <mfick@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:
> As a Gerrit developer and user, I would like a way to
> see/review cover letters in Gerrit. We have had many
> internal proposals, most based on git notes, but we have
> also used the empty commit trick. It would be nice if there
> were some standard git way to do this so that Gerrit and
> other tools could benefit from this standard. I am not
> suggesting that git need to be modified to do this, but
> rather that at least some convention be established.
Some of what you would write in the cover letter is not meant for
anywhere in the permanent history (e.g. description of what changed
since the previous reroll), but some other would be a concise
summary of what the entire series is about, and it would be nice if
it can be made part of the permanent record.
The problem with "empty commit trick" is that it is a commit whose
sole purpose is to describe the series, and its presence makes it
clear where the series ends, but the topology does not tell where
the series begins, so it is an unsatisifactory half-measure.
Ideally, I would think that you want that information when the
series is fully cooked and gets merged to a more permanent place in
the log message of the merge commit. At that point, where the
series started may become more clear from the topology (i.e. the set
difference X^..X for the resulting merge is what got merged). One
possible "hacky" convention could be
- Developers keep rerolling with the "empty commit with cover
letter material at the tip". topic@{upstream}..topic~1 are the
real changes, topic~0 is an empty "cover letter material".
- When the series is fully cooked, a new "git merge" option notices
that the topic is structured in a "strange" way, uncaps its tip
commit and merges the remainder of the series and adds the cover
letter material when presenting the editor to record the merge
commit. That is
$ git merge --cover-at-tip topic
would work roughly by doing the following:
- verify that "git rev-parse topic^^{tree} topic^{tree}" shows that
they record the same tree; otherwise it will error out, saying
the tip is not a pure cover.
- verify that "git rev-list ..topic^" shows that there is
something to merge after the tip is removed; otherwise it will
error out, saying that there is nothing to merge.
- run "git merge --no-ff --edit topic^1" but with the log
message of topic^{commit} in the editor's template.
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