Subject: Re: [PATCH v8 0/6] submodule: parallelize diff

From: Junio C Hamano <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 10 Feb 2023 09:42:58 -0800

Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason <[email-masked]> writes:

> Welcome to the club :)
>
> This came up before when I'd been sending mails like this for years,
> without realizing the difference:
> https://lore.kernel.org/git/[email-masked]/
> & https://lore.kernel.org/git/[email-masked]/

The organization makes it easier to identify the cover letter,
mechanically from the thread structure without relying on the
subject line [*], and that is one of the things that the procedure
to prepare the "What's cooking" report needs to do.

	Side note: When the "What's cooking" report is updated, it
	knows individual commits on a topic, and the message ID of
	the patch for each of these commits (they are recorded in
	refs/notes/amlog).  But the message ID of the cover letter
	is not recorded anywhere because it does not become any
	commit, so it looks at these messages to find references
	and/or in-reply-to.  A flat "everything including cover is
	reply to previous cover" organization would not help to find
	the cover of this iteration at all.

In Documentation/SubmittingPatches, we give unnecessary either-or
recommendation.  We should clearly spell it out instead, perhaps
something like this.

 Documentation/SubmittingPatches | 5 +++--
 1 file changed, 3 insertions(+), 2 deletions(-)

diff --git c/Documentation/SubmittingPatches w/Documentation/SubmittingPatches
index 927f7329a5..af7f2a4045 100644
--- c/Documentation/SubmittingPatches
+++ w/Documentation/SubmittingPatches
@@ -346,8 +346,9 @@ your code.  For this reason, each patch should be submitted
 
 Multiple related patches should be grouped into their own e-mail
 thread to help readers find all parts of the series.  To that end,
-send them as replies to either an additional "cover letter" message
-(see below), the first patch, or the respective preceding patch.
+send them as replies to an additional "cover letter" message
+(see below), which should be a reply to the "cover letter" of
+the previous iteration.
 
 If your log message (including your name on the
 `Signed-off-by` trailer) is not writable in ASCII, make sure that