Subject: Re: Semantics of change IDs (Re: Gerrit, GitButler, and Jujutsu projects collaborating on change-id commit footer)

From: Jacob Keller <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 15 Apr 2025 14:44:53 -0700

On 4/14/2025 12:54 PM, D. Ben Knoble wrote:
> 
> It looks to me, an outsider, like the problem is some combination of
> "I want to track a commit's evolution" and "I want to see related
> commits in review, esp. when it's an identical and already-approved
> commit." But I might be misreading, and clarifying the problem
> statement might help bring us to a better core solution?
> 
> [1]: https://lore.kernel.org/git/[email-masked]/T/#m038be849b9b4020c16c562d810cf77bad91a2c87
> 

To me, it seems like multiple different and independent problems are
being solved with something that is almost but not quite the same in
each of the major projects shown as examples. All of these projects
would benefit from having something built into git... but its a
challenge when they don't have the same semantics and don't quite solve
the same use cases.

It is hard to come up with something that is general enough to cover all
of the uses cases.

> Cheers,
> D. Ben Knoble
> 
> PS This discussion feels somewhat related to the classic GitHub
> problem of not presenting interdiffs/range-diffs: GitHub shows a
> too-flat source diff on force-pushes. Perhaps better web UI tooling
> about interdiff review (which I think is one of the things Gerrit
> does/wants to do?) makes change IDs less necessary, since interdiffs
> help connect evolutions of commits?
> 

I think interdiffs and range-diffs are very helpful. More exposure of
these in the various forges would be good. I suspect that creating an
easy to use web UI for these is a hard problem, especially as there are
a number of corner cases to get right.