Re: [GIT PULL] Please pull powerpc/linux.git powerpc-4.9-6 tag

[Michael Ellerman]

Linus Torvalds <torvalds@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:

> On Sat, Nov 26, 2016 at 12:11 AM, Michael Ellerman <mpe@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>>
>> powerpc fixes for 4.9 #6
>>
>> Fixes marked for stable:
>>  - Set missing wakeup bit in LPCR on POWER9 (Benjamin Herrenschmidt)
>>  - Fix the early OPAL console wrappers (Oliver O'Halloran)
>>  - Fixup kernel read only mapping (Aneesh Kumar K.V)
>>
>> Fixes for code merged this cycle:
>>  - Fix missing CRCs, add more asm-prototypes.h declarations (Nicholas Piggin)
>
> Pulled, but I wanted to talk about your merge "summary".
>
> Your merge summaries seem to be entirely automatically generated,
> which makes them less than great. I can see all that stuff in the git
> tree already, just formatting it differently isn't all that useful.

OK. The starting point is obviously an automatically generated list of
commits, but I have been editing that a fair bit to drop boring commits
and combine multiple commits into a single line, and then sort it by
topic area etc.

But obviously I'm not editing it enough, so I'll try to summarise it
much more heavily.

> For something like this late-rc pull when there are only a couple of
> commits, the end result actually ends up looking almost like a summary
> and all I did was remove the names that don't add to the description
> (and are in the git commits).

I actually do like to include the names, just to give people a bit of
acknowledgment in the pull request, but I can drop them if you prefer.
Or maybe I'll just include a credits section at the bottom of the tag
with everyone's name once, and you can drop that from the commit?

> For some of the bigger pull requests, the summary is almost anything
> but, and the only real value-add is the grouping by subject area.
>
> I really prefer a _summary_. Something that is human-legible. So that
> when people read the merge commit log, they get an overview of what
> changed, not a list of the details.

Right.

cheers