On Mon, 2022-07-18 at 21:04 +0200, Michal Suchánek wrote: > On Mon, Jul 18, 2022 at 01:35:11PM -0400, Konstantin Ryabitsev wrote: > > On Mon, Jul 18, 2022 at 06:18:11PM +0100, Stephen Finucane wrote: > > > ...to track evolution of a patch through time. > > > > > > tl;dr: How hard would it be to retrofit an 'ChangeID' concept à la the 'Change- > > > ID' trailer used by Gerrit into git core? > > > > I just started working on this for b4, with the notable difference that the > > change-id trailer is used in the cover letter instead of in individual > > commits, which moves the concept of "change" from a single commit to a series > > of commits. IMO, it's much more useful in that scope, because as series are > > reviewed and iterated, individual patches can get squashed, split up or > > otherwise transformed. > > You can turn that around and say that IDs of individual commits are more > powerful because they are preserved as series are reviewed, split, > merged, and commits cherry-picked. There's also the fact that many communities insist on small, atomic commits: they're much easier to review. It stands to reason that reviewing a series on a patch-by-patch basis is also much easier, as is reviewing a series _revision_ on a patch-by-patch basis. To be able to do this though, you need to be able to map patch revisions to their predecessors/successors and well as the series revisions. I don't see how you realistically rely on a series-only identifier. There's no reason 'git-format-patch' couldn't allow you to set an AuthorID/ChangeID/<whatever we want to call this field> value for a cover letter, though it obviously would need to be done manually since cover letters aren't git objects. git send-email \ --reroll-count 2 \ --series-id 300628e5-8b27-45fe-be71-95417f7ccd6f main Stephen > > Thanks > > Michal