Re: [PATCH] Add short author date to Fixes tag

"Theodore Tso" <[email protected]> Wed, 25 Feb 2026 17:35:39 -0500
Newsgroups dev.linux.lists.tech-board-discuss,org.kernel.vger.linux-doc,org.kernel.vger.linux-kernel,org.kernel.vger.workflows
Message-ID <[email protected]>
On Wed, Feb 25, 2026 at 10:45:48PM +0100, Alejandro Colomar wrote:
> The date gives more information to humans to decide if the commit is
> important to look up.  Sometimes, a subject can be ambiguous to the
> human, even if it's not ambiguous to a machine.  The date can help give
> some context to a human.  For example, one could relate a commit to a
> series that was merged around that date.

I'm really confused under what circumstances the date would ever be
*useful* to me.  In general, what I want to know is "is this fix
applicable to a branch I care about", which basically means I want to
know if a particular branch (a) has the commit id, or (b) has a commit
whose description contains a "commit upstream" line referencing the
commit.

The date is almost never interesting to me.  For upstream commits in
Linus's tree, the hint:

   Cc: [email protected] # 6.8+

Is a bit more interesting to me, but so long as there's a fixes tag
with a commit ID, I can just do a "git tag --contains <commit-id>" to
get the same information.

					- Ted