Change IDs for kernel patches [LWN.net]

Change IDs for kernel patches

Posted Sep 3, 2019 4:25 UTC (Tue) by Fowl (subscriber, #65667)
In reply to: Change IDs for kernel patches by kleptog
Parent article: Change IDs for kernel patches

> Given the ID is effectively a globally unique string

Indeed - I'm not sure why an actual GUID wouldn't work, they're shorter and don't require mailing anything. I guess they're a bit Microsoft-y.

Couldn't a first/arbitrary comit hash become the 'change ID'? Even if that exact commit never ends up in a tree it's a shortish, unique string that doesn't require any new tooling to generate.

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Change IDs for kernel patches

Posted Sep 3, 2019 6:50 UTC (Tue) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] (1 responses)

> Couldn't a first/arbitrary comit hash become the 'change ID'?

You don't really need it: it's highly likely that this particular commit would only exist on a developer's machine and would never be posted.

Change-Id: used by Gerrit is not really created by Gerrit - that's just a random string which git presubmit hook adds to the description if it's not there.

This is done that way precisely because Android developers don't have a central Gerrit server: there are bazillion of them - each vendor have one, Google have half-dozen and so on.

Change-Id just allows you to do a search, nothing more, nothing less.

Change IDs for kernel patches

Posted Sep 3, 2019 7:14 UTC (Tue) by Fowl (subscriber, #65667) [Link]

> You don't really need it: it's highly likely that this particular commit would only exist on a developer's machine and would never be posted.

And this confusion is probably the flaw in the idea - once people read 'commit hash' they'll be assume it's a commit they can find. ;)