With the recent ppc64 updates, a few patches in my tree didn't merge very easily. Being lazy, I asked one of the ppc64 developers to resync them for me. But, it happened to be someone other than the original author that did this.
When they got sent to me again, the original author's (and my) Signed-off-by: lines were gone, replaced by the nice fellow who merged them. This was certainly an artifact of how he generates patches and obviously not malicious, but I still wonder what the "right" thing to do is.
Do we show the logical flow?
Signed-off-by: original author Signed-off-by: patch merger Signed-off-by: tree maintainer
Or the actual flow of the patches, showing that they came back to the tree maintainer twice?
Signed-off-by: original author Signed-off-by: tree maintainer Signed-off-by: patch merger Signed-off-by: tree maintainer
I don't think it matters that much, although I personally prefer to see the person who sent it to me ("touched it last") be last in the list. That's partly because of the fact that especially with bigger merges (ie with Andrew), I just do a search-and-replace, and replace any "signed off by sender" with "signed off by sender and me".
At the same time, I think it's pretty unnecessary (and possibly confusing) to have somebody mentioned twice, so I'd actually prefer to see people just move their (previous) sign-off to be last when they send it on.
Side note: I also like seeing "Acked-by:" or "Cc:" things just above the sign-off lines, because it ends up being useful if there are any technical issues with the patch - if a bug is found, it's very convenient to just take all the sign-off people _and_ the other "involved" people and send off a query to them all. Even if that "Acked-by:" has no other meaning than as a mention of the fact that somebody else was involved in discussions, even if they may not have been involved in actually writing or passing off the ptch.
The protocol for adding an Acked-by line mystifies me a little.
If I submit a patch after having a good discussion of it with Joe Blow, is it appropriate for me to add an Acked-by line for Joe on my own, or should I get his consent (or know him well enough to know he consents) or should I only so add if Joe asks me to?
In other words, does the presence of such a line commit Joe to any position on the patch, beyond perhaps not being too annoyed if he gets queries on it.
-- I won't rest till it's the best ... Programmer, Linux Scalability Paul Jackson <p...@sgi.com> 1.650.933.1373 - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majord...@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
> The protocol for adding an Acked-by line mystifies me a little.
> If I submit a patch after having a good discussion of it with > Joe Blow, is it appropriate for me to add an Acked-by line for > Joe on my own, or should I get his consent (or know him well > enough to know he consents) or should I only so add if Joe > asks me to?
The "acked-by" thing doesn't mean anything, so you should just use your own judgement.
> In other words, does the presence of such a line commit Joe > to any position on the patch, beyond perhaps not being too > annoyed if he gets queries on it.
Nope. The annoyance factor is the only factor to take into account.
On Fri, 1 Oct 2004, Linus Torvalds wrote: > On Fri, 1 Oct 2004, Paul Jackson wrote:
> > The protocol for adding an Acked-by line mystifies me a little.
> > If I submit a patch after having a good discussion of it with > > Joe Blow, is it appropriate for me to add an Acked-by line for > > Joe on my own, or should I get his consent (or know him well > > enough to know he consents) or should I only so add if Joe > > asks me to?
> The "acked-by" thing doesn't mean anything, so you should just use your > own judgement.
Why am I expecting a new realty show called "Touched by a Torvalds"?
Sorry... I have been stuck coding in a little boring town in Southern Oregon for the last three days. (Kind of like Mountain View without all the excitement and with lots of trees.)
