Elijah Newren <newren@xxxxxxxxx> writes: > The cover letter material often includes stuff that would not make > sense for the merge message (e.g. "Rebased this version on master > because of conflicts with ...", "Changes since v3", "I'm a little > unsure of the logic in Patch 5", "Patch 3 might be controversial; take > a look", etc.) Would there be some kind of syntax for specifying the > part of the cover letter meant to be used in the merge commit message, > or would we just start out with it pre-populating the commit message > and expect the integrator to cull out the irrelevant parts? Yeah, I wanted to flesh out a bit more details on how this may work before writing more about it, but what I envisioned would go something along this line: * The authoring side would keep track of the description of the topic as a whole plus the description of inter-iteration changes, in the empty tip commit. There may be some convention with a minimum mark-up (similar to how an innocuous three-dash line serves the "end of the message" marker in a patch e-mail) to separate the latter from the former. * "format-patch --cover-letter" would take the above, and add range-diff etc. that is easier to compute mechanically; * "am" may take the above, and keep the whole thing; * "merge" would keep the "main topic description" part and strip out everything after it, including the inter-iteration comparison and the range-diff, most likely by commenting the latter out when presenting it to the integrator. So a lazy integrator can simply exit the editor to lose everything other than the topic description, and a more careful ones may refer to the supporting material to enhance/extend the topic description.
