On Mon, Feb 12, 2007 at 03:20:45PM +0100, Segher Boessenkool wrote:
You can only commit a patch to the tree if you take responsibility for it (at some level), and that means you'll have to sign off on it.
Ok, so our policy is that the committer always adds a sign off?
If not, the whole signed-off-by thing becomes useless, so it better be policy.
now, why exactly?
It's point (c) in the DCO.
If you allow any code to be checked in without the person doing that stating he has the the right to do that, i.e. without adding the signed-off, all previous signed-off statements (by the original developer, etc.) have no significance as to whether the LinuxBIOS project did check if it was allowed (for IP or copyright reasons) to use the code. Only full chains work; one missing link and it's broken.
This means that the practice of adding an ack while committing a patch that you did not take part in writing is incorrect.
The "commit" message the repo gives you only tells you who did the check in; it doesn't say that the commiter states that he checked to the best of his knowledge that he is allowed to (re-)publish that source code.
The correct action would be to sign off. But then there is no ack (only multiple sign offs) and so not at least one developer has acked the patch.
This is inconsistent and confusing. We just need to settle on one way to do it and document that.
//Peter