Re: Link trailers revisited (was Re: [GIT PULL] io_uring fix for 6.17-rc5)

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

On Tue, 9 Sept 2025 at 10:08, Mark Brown <broonie@kernel.org> wrote:
>
> That works great for pull requests, but it's not so useful for a random
> patch like 5f9efb6b7667043527d377421af2070cc0aa2ecd

Sure it is.

The one-liner is just different. Use the patch-id instead. See Dan's
email - and the whole long discussion about how lore *ALREADY* has
most of this support.

Yeah, the patch-id command is admittedly a bit more esoteric than just
looking up the merge parent commit.

Using "git rev-parse" is already a bit obscure (although honestly,
it's a really useful command, and I actually do use it somewhat
regularly from the command line).

Using "git patch-id" is definitely in the "write a script for it"
category. I don't think I've ever used it as-is from the command line
as part of a one-liner. It's very much a command that is designed
purely for scripting, the interface is just odd and baroque and
doesn't really make sense for one-liners.

The typical use of patch-id is to generate two *lists* of patch-ids,
then sort them and use the patch-id as a key to find commits that look
the same.

That hopefully explains why the patch-id behavior is so odd, and not
really suited for using directly on the command line.

But my point is that we really have the infrastructure already in
place, and it's better than hardcoding some broken link into commits.

Now, I don't have that commit you mention (I assume it's some recent
commit in your own tree), but I picked a random commit from my
top-of-tree that contains one of those useless links, and look here:

   patchid=$(git diff-tree -p fef7ded169ed7e133612f90a032dc2af1ce19bef
| git patch-id | cut -d' ' -f1)
   firefox http://lore.kernel.org/all/?q=patchid:$patchid

and it's right there. It finds the stable tree backport too, and if
there had been multiple versions of the same patch posted, it would
have found the history of it all too.

Look, I readily admit that I would never write that as a one-liner. In
fact, I got it wrong the first time - I don't use 'cut' often enough,
and I forgot that the default delimeter is 'tab', not space, and got
garbage.

So that 'patch-id' generation line is just crazy line noise. I'm *not*
suggesting you do that.

But this kind of thing is literally what I'm talking about when I say
"maybe we could add a few scripts to support what you are doing".

                 Linus