Re: [workflow] Automatically close bug report when a patch is committed

[Maxim Cournoyer <maxim.cournoyer@gmail.com>]

Hi,

Simon Tournier <zimon.toutoune@gmail.com> writes:

> Hi,
>
> On Wed, 13 Sep 2023 at 21:14, Liliana Marie Prikler <liliana.prikler@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> I do wonder how the ChangeId would work in practice.  Since it's not
>> really assigned by the committer, it would have to be generated "on the
>> fly" and attached to the mail in between, which could result in all
>> kinds of nasty behaviour like unstable Ids or duplicated ones.  Also,
>> if we can automate this for ChangeIds, we could also automate this for
>> patch-sets – the last patch in the series just gets the Closes: tag
>> added by mumi.
>
> I think it would work using some pre-commit hook.  When one commits
> their change, this commit is run and it can pre-fill the commit
> message.  Well, that’s how I have understood the thread.

Yes; exactly like how it's done in Gerrit, if you've ever used that
(we'd reuse their hook).  It'd be enabled out-of-the-box so it'd be
transparent to users.

>> Furthermore, I'm not convinced that it would ease the issue of
>> forgotten bugs as you can't really apply them to the past.  So the
>> practical use is limited to the case where you intentionally cherry-
>> pick this or that commit from a series.  How we want to deal with that
>> case could be a discussion in its own right, and maybe ChangeIds really
>> trump the explicit tags proposed by Giovanni or myself here.  Whether
>> that justifies the cognitive overhead of juggling them around on every
>> submission remains to be shown or disproven.

I like the 'Closes: ' trailer idea; it's simple.  However, it'd need to
be something added locally, either the user typing it out (unlikely for
most contributors) or via some mumi wizardry (it's unlikely that all
users will use mumi), which means its usage (and value) would depend on
how motivated individuals are to learn these new tricks.

On the other hands, having Change-Ids added by a pre-commit hook
automatically would means the user doesn't need to do anything special
other than using git, and we could still infer useful information at any
time (in a server hook, or as a batch process).

For this reason, I think we could have both (why not?  Change-Ids by
themselves provide some value already -- traceability between our git
history and guix-patches).

-- 
Thanks,
Maxim