Re: storing cover letter of a patch series?

[Jacob Keller <jacob.keller@gmail.com>]

On Thu, Sep 10, 2015 at 11:02 AM, Martin Fick <mfick@codeaurora.org> wrote:
> On Thursday, September 10, 2015 10:41:54 AM Junio C Hamano
> wrote:
>>
>> I think "should" is too strong here.  Yes, you could
>> implement that way.  It is debatable if it is better, or
>> a flat file kept in a directory (my-topic/ in the example
>> above) across rerolls is more flexible, lightweight and
>> with less mental burden to the users. --
>
> As a Gerrit developer and user, I would like a way to
> see/review cover letters in Gerrit.  We have had many
> internal proposals, most based on git notes, but we have
> also used the empty commit trick.  It would be nice if there
> were some standard git way to do this so that Gerrit and
> other tools could benefit from this standard.  I am not
> suggesting that git need to be modified to do this, but
> rather that at least some convention be established.
>
> -Martin
>

Having used gerrit, this would be useful as well. The "empty commit
message" thing sort of works, but has issues.

I don't know if this could be solved for gerrit at all without
modification to git, since you'd need something that can be sent to
the gerrit server and received by the client.

Some form of git-notes might work, ie: a git-notes on the first
commit, stored in some "standard" refs/notes/cover or similar.. but
this would depend on implementation of a standard way to share notes.

One alternative as well is to use a --no-ff merge commit which forces
the merge between the base and the tip of the series and contains the
contents.. but I don't believe gerrit really works well with merge
commits.

But again, Junio's solution will work great for emails workflow, which
is my primary usage.