On Wed, Oct 8, 2025, at 23:20, Taylor Blau wrote:

[snip]
I wrote it this way to account for individuals listed under the
Co-authored-by trailer. I'm not entirely sure that I'm following the
latter half of this sentence. Could you clarify what you mean?

Sorry. I tried to say that: I don’t think “primary” makes it more clear
that one should use the Git author compared to just “author”.

quoted

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.

That's fair, though I admittedly dislike the idea of prescribing a
format for the cover letter. It should be clear to those (such as the
maintainer) who are reading the cover letter closely whether or not the
first paragraph (or two) are meant to be used as the topic name/summary.

I think saying that the cover letter should start with them is just as
much of a prescription as saying that they should be marked with some
paragraph-prefix (and be somewhere in the cover letter). Some people
might prefer to start the letter with what they think are important
call-out information and get to the topic summary later. For example.

[snip]