On Thu, Dec 03, 2020 at 08:55:54AM -0800, Joe Perches wrote: > Perhaps automate a mechanism to capture that information as > git notes for the patches when applied.
Git notes have a limited usefulness for this -- they are indeed part of the repository, but they aren't replicated unless someone does a --mirror clone (or specifically fetches refs/notes/*). If the goal is to improve visibility for contributors, then putting this info into a git note will hardly make more difference than providing a Link: that someone has to follow to a list archival service. I can offer the following proposal: - kernel.org already monitors all mailing lists that are archived on lore.kernel.org for the purposes of pull request tracking (pr-tracker-bot). - in the near future, we will add a separate process that will auto-explode all pull requests into individual patches and add them to a separate public-inbox archive (think of it as another transparency log, since pull requests are transient and opaque). We can additionally: - identify all Link: and Message-Id: entries in commit messages, retrieve the threads they refer to, and archive them as part of the same (or adjacent) transparency log. This offers an improvement over the status quo, because if lore.kernel.org becomes unavailable, someone would have to have access to all backend archive repositories it is currently tracking in order to be able to reconstitute relevant conversations -- whereas with this change, it should be sufficient to just have the copy of the transparency log to have a fully self-contained high-relevancy archive of both individual commits and conversations that happened around them. I'm just not sure if this will help with the subject of the conversation, or if it does not serve the goal of recognizing developer contributions by making them more visible. -K
