Re: [PATCH] chdir-notify.h: Removed unused param 'name'

Jeff King [off-list ref] writes:

I think this makes sense. It is often helpful in cleanup patches to
summarize the history in the commit message. And then we can be sure
that the unused field is OK to be removed, and it is not simply a bug
that nobody is passing in the value.

Thanks for mentioning this.  I also was curious when we lost the
users of "name", as it is hard to believe that we introduced name
that nobody uses from day one.

I think ultimately the reason is that the only user of the "name" field
was chdir_notify_reparent(), when it produced trace output. That went
away in 5bf546755c (chdir-notify: drop unused `chdir_notify_reparent()`,
2026-06-25).

OK.  That is fairly recent.  The reason why we used to need reparent
but we no longer do is because...?

    ... goes and looks ...

Ah, because the files backend of the refs subsystem started solving
the issue it used to solve with _reparent() differently in the same
series, losing the last caller of the _reparent() API.

Makes sense.

So those other patches were preparing for that world, though I think the
ordering is somewhat confusing (and I won't be surprised if there was
some intermediate state where turning on tracing might have caused a
segfault).

So AFAICT the patch itself is good, but it might be nice to give some
explanation in the commit message.

Yes, that would be very helpful.

Thanks.