In a talk in the refereed track of the 2017 Linux Plumbers Conference, Alexandre Courouble presented the email2git tool that links kernel commits to their review discussion on the mailing lists. Email2git is a plugin for cregit, which implements token-level history for a Git repository; we covered a talk on cregit just over one year ago. Email2git combines cregit with Patchwork to link the commit to a patch and its discussion threads from any of the mailing lists that are scanned by patchwork.kernel.org. The result is a way to easily find the discussion that led to a piece of code—or even just a token—changing in the kernel source tree.
Courouble began with a short demo of the tool. It can be accessed by typing (or pasting) in a commit ID on this web page, which brings up a list of postings of the patch to various mailing lists; following those links shows the thread where it was posted (and, often, discussed). Another way to get there is to use cregit; navigating to a particular file then clicking on a token will bring up a similar list that relates to the patch where the symbol was changed. Note that the Patchwork data only goes back to 2009, so commits before that time will not produce any results.
Read more at LWN
