Part of the maintainer's job is to keep up-to-date and publish the 'amlog' which stores a mapping between a patch's 'Message-Id' e-mail header and the commit generated by applying said patch. But our Documentation/howto/maintain-git.txt does not mention the amlog, or the scripts which exist to help the maintainer keep the amlog up-to-date. (This bit me during the first integration round I did as interim maintainer[1] involved a lot of manual clean-up. More recently it has come up as part of a research effort to better understand a patch's lifecycle on the list[2].) Address this gap by briefly documenting the existence and purpose of the 'post-applypatch' hook in maintaining the amlog entries. [1]: https://lore.kernel.org/git/Y19dnb2M+yObnftj@nand.local/ [2]: https://lore.kernel.org/git/CAJoAoZ=4ARuH3aHGe5yC_Xcnou_c396q_ZienYPY7YnEzZcyEg@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx/ Suggested-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@xxxxxxxxx> Signed-off-by: Taylor Blau <me@xxxxxxxxxxxx> --- Documentation/howto/maintain-git.txt | 16 ++++++++++++++++ 1 file changed, 16 insertions(+) diff --git a/Documentation/howto/maintain-git.txt b/Documentation/howto/maintain-git.txt index da31332f11..fd1560327c 100644 --- a/Documentation/howto/maintain-git.txt +++ b/Documentation/howto/maintain-git.txt @@ -165,6 +165,22 @@ by doing the following: In practice, almost no patch directly goes to 'master' or 'maint'. + The maintainer is expected to update refs/notes/amlog with a + mapping between the applied commit and the 'Message-Id' + corresponding to the e-mail which carried the patch. + + This mapping is created with the aid of the "post-applypatch" hook + found in the 'todo' branch. That hook should be installed before + applying patches. It is also helpful to carry forward any relevant + amlog entries when rebasing, so the following config may be useful: + + [notes] + rewriteref = refs/notes/amlog + + Finally, take care that the amlog entries are pushed out during + integration cycles since external tools and contributors (in + addition to internal scripts) may rely on them. + - Review the last issue of "What's cooking" message, review the topics ready for merging (topic->master and topic->maint). Use "Meta/cook -w" script (where Meta/ contains a checkout of the base-commit: 3857aae53f3633b7de63ad640737c657387ae0c6 -- 2.46.2.633.gf09c3c1769.dirty
