Cover Letter of Patchsets
Hi Tom,
I am Leo, just recently joined the community. and been picking up the guide line of uboot's development.
I am a bit curious about the policy on the cover letter of patchsets. Is cover letter mandatory ?
IMHO, making it mandatory, especially on patchsets that consist of more than 1 patch, is more than useful and of great advantages.
1. Making patches clearer for peer and maintainer review
The reviewer and maintainer could immediately understand, or at least get the idea of, the whole patchset through only reading this ONE cover letter without having to dive into each of the patch.
And thus quickly determine if the patchset solves the problem or if the patchset is well organized.
2. Helping the author better organize the patchset
Writing the cover letter would require the author to scrutinize the patchset structure again, in order to elaborate his/her craft.
So when composing the letter, the relevance of each patch would be thoroghly looked over and the patchset might be refined into small but more closely-related patchsets.
And it would be easier for the maintainer to pull small gradual changes than a huge patchset with lots of changes at once.
In all, I think it would be nice to write cover letter to introduce the work.
If I miss anything or misunderstand anything please let me know, thanks in advance.
Best regards, Leo
Dear Leo,
In message 20200706023510.GB2522@andestech.com you wrote:
I am Leo, just recently joined the community. and been picking up the guide line of uboot's development.
I am a bit curious about the policy on the cover letter of patchsets. Is cover letter mandatory ?
No, it is not really mandatoryh, but strongl recommended for patch series.
IMHO, making it mandatory, especially on patchsets that consist of more than 1 patch, is more than useful and of great advantages.
For single patches a cover letter usually makes little sense.
- Making patches clearer for peer and maintainer review
...
- Helping the author better organize the patchset
...
In all, I think it would be nice to write cover letter to introduce the work.
All your arguments make a lot of sense, indeed.
If I miss anything or misunderstand anything please let me know, thanks in advance.
Please keep in mind that an inherent property of the cover letter is that it is NOT part of the patches itself, i. e. it helps only during the review process, but not any time later when someone tries to understand the code from reading the git commit logs.
So the essential information to understand the purpose and the implementation (and ideally also how it has been tested / can be tested) should always be part of the commit messages itself.
THe cover letter can summarize such information and provide the overview information for a patch series. Also it should commet on the changes between versions of the patch series, if these are needed (especially when major rework is done between submissions).
But it is only supplementary information which gets lost when the patches are pulled into the git repository.
Best regards,
Wolfgang Denk
Dear Wolfgang,
On Mon, Jul 06, 2020 at 08:03:46PM +0800, Wolfgang Denk wrote:
Dear Leo,
In message 20200706023510.GB2522@andestech.com you wrote:
I am Leo, just recently joined the community. and been picking up the guide line of uboot's development.
I am a bit curious about the policy on the cover letter of patchsets. Is cover letter mandatory ?
No, it is not really mandatoryh, but strongl recommended for patch series.
IMHO, making it mandatory, especially on patchsets that consist of more than 1 patch, is more than useful and of great advantages.
For single patches a cover letter usually makes little sense.
- Making patches clearer for peer and maintainer review
...
- Helping the author better organize the patchset
...
In all, I think it would be nice to write cover letter to introduce the work.
All your arguments make a lot of sense, indeed.
If I miss anything or misunderstand anything please let me know, thanks in advance.
Please keep in mind that an inherent property of the cover letter is that it is NOT part of the patches itself, i. e. it helps only during the review process, but not any time later when someone tries to understand the code from reading the git commit logs.
So the essential information to understand the purpose and the implementation (and ideally also how it has been tested / can be tested) should always be part of the commit messages itself.
THe cover letter can summarize such information and provide the overview information for a patch series. Also it should commet on the changes between versions of the patch series, if these are needed (especially when major rework is done between submissions).
But it is only supplementary information which gets lost when the patches are pulled into the git repository.
Understood! Thank you very much for the clarification.
Best regards, Leo
participants (2)
-
Leo Liang -
Wolfgang Denk