Re: possible fuzziness for b4 trailers -u?

On Thu, Jun 18, 2026 at 10:50:52AM +0200, Vlastimil Babka (SUSE) wrote:
> I sometimes run b4 trailers -u to collect tags on patches that have been
> meanwhile slightly modified in git since the posting. Sometimes it's on the
> b4/$cover_topic branch as a submitter, sometimes it's already applied (but
> not stable as in no history rewrite) on a maintainer tree branch (I do use
> --since-commit and doublecheck the result of the update closely since some
> past surprises...).
> 
> AFAICS the trailers update relies only patch-id (?) so it will miss the tags
> when patch-id changes due to these local modifications. Could it try some
> fuzzy matching in that case? Some ideas:
> 
> - in b4/$cover_topic branch the metadata allows finding the posting thread
> and matching the patch subject
>   - ok, subject can sometimes change too, but not so often as the code
> 
> - in maintainer tree branch, there's usually a patch.msgid.link Link: that
> can lead to the given patch rather deterministically.

This was actually easier than I'd thought, because we already did the bulk of
this logic for "b4 dig". The latest master has a new --fuzzy flag to `b4
trailers`, which you can also couple with the new --interactive flag, which
should let you review the trailers before you actually apply them.

Try it out and let me know if this is what you were looking for.

Cheers,
-K