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

On Wed, Oct 8, 2025, at 23:24, Taylor Blau wrote:

[snip]

quoted

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.

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/cover.1731768344.git.code@khaugsbakk.name/ (local)

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]