### Problem to solve Extracting information about which issues and merge requests are relevant to a given commit by looking at the git repository for a project means parsing human-readable commit messages. ### Target audience Release manager who has to list all the changes made in a particular software release ### Proposal Store a machine-readable reference to the merge request and/or issue which was closed by (or was otherwise related to) a given git commit, in a `git notes` note for that commit. Either do that for individual commits, or once per merge commit. Use a `git notes` tree (see its documentation on its `--ref` argument) which contains the path of the GitLab installation, so that repositories which are linked to multiple GitLab installations can have such multiple notes in parallel. This could happen if a commit is cherry-picked from an upstream git repository to a downstream packaging repository by a Linux distribution, and both repositories are managed by separate GitLab installations. e.g. Augment each merge commit with something like the following: ``` echo -e "closes-issues=1234,2345\nmerge-request=456" | \ git notes --ref gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce add -F - "${merge_commit_checksum}" ``` <!--- How are we going to solve the problem? Try to include the user journey! --> ### What does success look like, and how can we measure that? Using just a clone of the git repository, it’s possible to unambiguously and completely map each commit to the set of merge requests and issues which it closes or is related to, without having to parse human-readable commit messages. <!--- Define both the success metrics and acceptance criteria. Note thet success metrics indicate the desired business outcomes, while acceptance criteria indicate when the solution is working correctly. If there is no way to measure success, link to an issue that will implement a way to measure this --> ### Links / references Desirable for https://gitlab.gnome.org/pwithnall/gitlab-changelog.