Thread (54 messages) 54 messages, 9 authors, 2026-06-16

Re: [PATCH v2 2/3] Documentation/MyFirstContribution: recommend the use of b4

From: Toon Claes <hidden>
Date: 2026-06-04 05:25:43

Patrick Steinhardt [off-list ref] writes:
quoted hunk ↗ jump to hunk
The b4 tool originates from the Linux kernel community and is intended
to help mailing-list based workflows. It automates a lot of the annoying
bookkeeping tasks that contributors typically need to do: tracking the
list of recipients, Message-IDs, range-diffs and the like. In addition
to that, b4 also has many other subcommands that help the maintainer and
reviewers.

The Git project uses the same infrastructure as the kernel, so this tool
is also a very good fit for us. Adapt "MyFirstContribution" to
explicitly recommend its use.

Signed-off-by: Patrick Steinhardt <redacted>
---
 Documentation/MyFirstContribution.adoc | 92 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++--
 Documentation/SubmittingPatches        |  6 ++-
 2 files changed, 93 insertions(+), 5 deletions(-)
diff --git a/Documentation/MyFirstContribution.adoc b/Documentation/MyFirstContribution.adoc
index 069020196c..fc0b06ae67 100644
--- a/Documentation/MyFirstContribution.adoc
+++ b/Documentation/MyFirstContribution.adoc
@@ -833,7 +833,7 @@ This patchset is part of the MyFirstContribution tutorial and should not
 be merged.
 ----
 
-At this point the tutorial diverges, in order to demonstrate two
+At this point the tutorial diverges, in order to demonstrate three
 different methods of formatting your patchset and getting it reviewed.
 
 The first method to be covered is GitGitGadget, which is useful for those
@@ -845,9 +845,14 @@ more fine-grained control over the emails to be sent. This method requires some
 setup which can change depending on your system and will not be covered in this
 tutorial.
 
+The third method to be covered is `b4`, which builds on top of `git
+format-patch` and `git send-email`. This method is the recommended way to
+submit patches via mail as it automates a lot of the bookkeeping required by
+`git send-email`.
The GitGitGadget method includes Running CI, maybe that's worth
mentioning the user is responsible themselves to run the whole test
suite? Or is this outside the scope of this series, since `git
send-email` doesn't include that too.

-- 
Cheers,
Toon
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