Subject: Re: [PATCH 1/2] SubmittingPatches: extend release-notes experiment to topic names

From: "Kristoffer Haugsbakk" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 09 Oct 2025 00:03:51 +0200

On Wed, Oct 8, 2025, at 23:24, Taylor Blau wrote:
>[snip]
>> > But it was noted[1] that the-topic-summary doesn’t seem to have been
>> > used much. That’s not surprising given that the instruction makes
>> > the-topic-summary blend in with the rest of the cover letter and doesn’t
>> > signal that the author intends for the first paragraph to be used as
>> > such. This patch shares the same problem.
>>
>> Oh, that's a new theory.  So you are saying that authors may have
>> tried but I (and others) failed to notice?  It cetainly is possible.
>
> Certainly possible indeed, but I am not so sure this is happening. At
> least from the series that I have looked at since this experiment was
> introduced, I have seen vanishingly few examples of contributors
> following the process suggested here.
>

I had a look and found one cover letter where I definitely tried to use
the-topic-summary:

    The documentation for git-bundle(1) now prominently covers `--all`, the
    option from git-rev-list(1) that can be used to package all refs.  A
    "Discussion" section has also been added to address the naive backup
    strategy of copying a Git repository manually with cp(1) or some other
    non-Git tool.

    ---

    The part above was for the-topic-summary.

https://lore.kernel.org/git/[email-masked]/

The merge commit message and the release note entry:

     Documentation for "git bundle" saw improvements to more prominently
     call out the use of '--all' when creating bundles.

Contrasted with no judgement.

> [snip]