Re: some thoughts on gerrit

[Sergio Durigan Junior <sergiodj at redhat dot com>]

On Sunday, October 20 2019, I wrote:

> On Sunday, October 20 2019, Tom Tromey wrote:
>> The cover letter is often a good guide to what is going on in the
>> series.  See for example:
>>
>> https://sourceware.org/ml/gdb-patches/2019-10/msg00590.html
>>
>> It seems a shame to lose this.
>
> I absolutely agree.
>
>> One counter-argument about the cover letter I thought of is that,
>> because it doesn't end up in the history, maybe the lack of it will
>> force us to make each commit message even clearer.  And, we should do
>> that ... it's just that the roadmap is handy when reviewing.
>
> I see your point, but I still think a cover letter serves a different
> purpose than the commit messages.  A cover letter introduces the big
> picture, and it is often a good place for reviewers to make generic
> comments about the overall implementation.
>
>> I wonder if there'd be a way to make "git review" prompt for a cover
>> letter and attach it somewhere as a comment.
>
> That could work, I guess, but it would still be a bit cumbersome.
>
> I found this on gerrit's bugzilla:
>
>   https://bugs.chromium.org/p/gerrit/issues/detail?id=924
>
> It seems like there was a request, but it was closed very recently due
> to inactivity.  Perhaps we could try pushing a bit more...

Ah, something I forgot to say: a possible (but hacky) workaround that I
thought for the cover letter problem is to create an empty commit before
everything else, with just the commit message.  We'd have to
"garbage-collect" it manually when the series is pushed (or maybe we can
figure out a way to do that automatically; not sure), but it could
work...

The other problem with this workaround is that it will not be possible
to create threading using the cover letter as the root message.

Thanks,

-- 
Sergio
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