Git Notes: Git's coolest, most unloved­ feature (2022)

Git notes are only cool if you frequently add text to a commit after the commit has happened and visible to others.

The Acked-By and mailing list discussion link examples don't seem to be good examples. Both of these are likely already known when the commit is made. And git commit message basically can have an unlimited length, so you could very well copy all the discussions about the commit that happened on a forge into the commit message itself.

One use case I think might be a better example is to add a git note to a commit that has later been reverted.

> The Acked-By and mailing list discussion link examples don't seem to be good examples. Both of these are likely already known when the commit is made.

Discussion regarding a commit (is: review) and acknowledgment of a commit cannot happen before the commit has been made.

> One use case I think might be a better example is to add a git note to a commit that has later been reverted.

Commit messages are better for this use case. When you got blame a file, it shows the latest changes for that file. If a commit reverts changes from another commit, the newer commit that reverts the older commit will show up in the blame.

You’re treating a commit as an atom, which is not true in patch based git situations like Linux.

Most of the rest of us do not work this way, but they still do. The rest of us also only have to deal with three way merges most of the time, instead of octopus merges. Though I jokingly call, “fixing an incorrect three way merge” a “five way merge” because you end up doing a star shaped pattern of diffs to re-resolve the code to retain the intents of all three versions. A to merge, B to merge, merge to HEAD~, A to HEAD~ and B to HEAD~

I'm not really sure what you mean by this. Git treats commits as atomic (unchangeable), and thus they are atoms (indivisible). This is not really related to patches, unless you're referring to partially applying patch series. Can you elaborate on what you mean?