On Tue, Sep 19, 2023, Paul Durrant wrote: > On 18/09/2023 18:12, Sean Christopherson wrote: > [snip] > > > > Tag them RFC, explain your expectations, goals, and intent in the cover letter, > > don't copy+paste cover letters verbatim between versions, and summarize the RFC(s) > > when you get to a point where you're ready for others to jump in. The cover > > letter is *identical* from v1=>v2=>v3, how is anyone supposed to understand what > > on earth is going on unless they happened to be in the same room as ya'll on > > Friday? > > The cover letter is indeed identical because the purpose of the series has > not changed. For anything out of the ordinary, e.g. posting v3 just a few hours after v2 is definitely not normal, use the cover letter to call out why you're posting a particular version of the series, not just the purpose of the series. > > In other words, use tags and the cover letter to communicate, don't just view the > > cover letter as a necessary evil to get people to care about your patches. > > That was not the intention at all; I put all the detailed explanation in the > commit comments because I thought that would make review *easier*. Per-patch comments *might* make individual patches easier to review, but (for me at least) they are waaay less helpful for reviewing series as a whole, and all but usless for initial triage. E.g. for a situation like this where a series has reached v4 before I've so much as glanced at the patches, having the history in the cover letter allows me to catch up and get a feel for how the series got to v4 in ~20 seconds. With per-patch comments, I have to go find each comment and then piece together the bigger picture. Per-patch comments also don't work well if a version makes minor changes to a large series (hunting through a 10+ patch series to figure out that only one patch changed is not exactly efficient), if a patch is dropped, if there are changes to the overall approach, etc.
