Re: [GIT PULL] io_uring fix for 6.17-rc5

[Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>]

On Fri, 5 Sept 2025 at 10:45, Konstantin Ryabitsev
<konstantin@linuxfoundation.org> wrote:
>
> Do you just want this to become a no-op, or will it be better if it's used
> only with the patch.msgid.link domain namespace to clearly indicate that it's
> just a provenance link?

So I wish it at least had some way to discourage the normal mindless
use - and in a perfect world that there was some more useful model for
adding links automatically.

For example, I feel like for the cover letter of a multi-commit
series, the link to the patch series submission is potentially more
useful - and likely much less annoying - because it would go into the
merge message, not individual commits.

Because if somebody is actively looking at a merge message, they are
probably looking for some bigger picture background - or there's some
merge conflict - and at that point I expect that the initial
submission might be more relevant.

Of course, most people don't necessarily *use* the cover letter for a
merge, and only apply the patches as a series, so it's also less
annoying for the simple reason that it probably wouldn't exist in the
git history at all ;)

Anyway, the "discourage mindless use" might be as simple as a big
warning message that the link may be just adding annoying overhead.

In contrast, a "perfect" model might be to actually have some kind of
automation of "unless there was actual discussion about it".

But I feel such a model might be much too complicated, unless somebody
*wants* to explore using AI because their job description says "Look
for actual useful AI uses". In today's tech world, I assume such job
descriptions do exist. Sigh.

For example, since 'b4' ends up looking through the downstream thread
of a patch anyway in order to add acked-by lines etc, I do think that
in theory there could be some "there was lively discussion about this
particular patch, so a link is actually worth it" heuristic.

In theory.

And honestly, even if the discussion ends up being worthless, I do
suspect I would be a lot *less* annoyed by a link that at least leads
to some _thread_ (and not just the acked-by emails that already got
gathered up), rather than just leading to an email that was applied
and nobody really had any input on.

At least at that point I'd feel like there's something real there.

And yes, as always, I realize that people think that patch submissions
will get more email replies at some hypothetical _later_ date.  But in
practice, that seldom happens, because the downstream testing issues
typically create new threads, not replies to original emails (and if
they *do* react to the original email, we already can look up the
commit easily, and the lookup goes the other way anyway).

           Linus