Adopting "Fixes" trailer

[Kubilay Kocak]

On 19/02/2021 6:30 am, Ed Maste wrote:
> On Thu, 18 Feb 2021 at 11:53, John Baldwin <jhb at freebsd.org> wrote:
>>
>>> https://reviews.freebsd.org/D28693
>>
>> Huh, at first I thought this was to auto-close issues on GitHub.  I think
>> this is a good idea.  If we had a wrapper script for MFC's it could
>> auto-squash those as an option perhaps.
> 
> Ah, I think that's typically "Closes: <identifier>"
> 
> Indeed we could search for Fixes in an MFC wrapper; the MFC reminder
> mails and https://gitmfc.kernelnomicon.org could also be extended to
> list related Fixes commits.


Fixes/Closes & References within commit log messages are common keywords 
to close, and add comments to (respectively) to issues (as properties: 
or trailers, or within commit bodies (non trailer))

It would be nice to reserve/use those for issue tracker 
integration/automation.

One possible dual-use is "References[:] <commit|issue>" but the value 
parsing ambiguity between a commit hash and issue number can sometimes 
cause problems or be less than robust. (that ive seen from other projects)

> It is used to identify a commit that is a follow-up bug
> fix to a previous commit, and could generally be used instead of "MFC with"
> or "X-MFC-with". One nice aspect is that it conveys fix metadata also for
> commits that aren't intended for MFC, which may be useful for downstream
> projects.

Could you clarify this use case, and provide a couple of examples?

Sounds like we want a way to link/ref/relate a sequence or particular 
set/series of commits so they can be identified as 
logically/functionally related, so as to take a consistent set of 
actions with them as a group (merge, or anything else)

Is that a decent summary?