At 19:50 +0000 05 Dec 2012, Peter Stephenson <p.w.stephenson@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Apart from sorting out the patch level and the mailing list links, it
I'm still unclear about what is expected in regards to handling of the mailing list links. Why is it necessary to handle those differently for git than is currently done with CVS, just mention the sequence number in the commit message?
For patches that are sent to the mailing list and then added to the official repository the sequence number would obviously be known before the commit is done, so the commit message could be edited to include it at that time.
If submissions start being sent more in the form of pull requests rather than patches sent to the list, the changes could be merged using `git merge --no-ff --edit` (the --edit option is the default in recent versions of git, so wouldn't always be necessary) to create a new commit with its own commit message where the sequence number could be included. This would mean that somebody who uses `git bisect` to try to determine where something was introduced would likely find the original commit, and would need to look forward a bit in the history to find the relevant sequence number; but that doesn't seem to be a huge burden to me.
This has the advantage that these links would be in the commit message no matter if the commit was done before or after the conversion. Since there isn't really a standard format for these messages, it would be difficult to automatically convert the existing ones and it would be a tedious (and error-prone) process to do that manually. It also doesn't require that people need to know anything about git notes which are still somewhat of an obscure area of git.