On 2/22/07, Uwe Hermann uwe@hermann-uwe.de wrote:
Hi,
On Tue, Feb 13, 2007 at 01:15:09PM +0100, Uwe Hermann wrote:
OK, how about this procedure (I don't really care anymore whether it's compatible with the way it works in Linux, it should only be legally "bullet-proof"):
Everyone who creates or modifies a patch adds his Signed-off-by.
The person who finally commits the patch adds his/her Signed-off-by, too (if it's not already there anyway).
And puts in the commit line from svn, e.g. Commited revision 204
The Acked-by is completely separated from that. You send an Acked-by when you think this patch can be committed. You don't have to modify a patch for an Acked-by, you can just send it to say "I think this patch is ok".
If a certain version of a patch received two Acked-by's by two different people, it can be committed. Ergo, every commit message will have 1 or more Signed-off-by lines which build a "chain of trust" for legal reasons, _and_ it will have 2 or more Acked-by lines which enforce our review process.
The Acked-by's must be for exactly the same version of the patch. Acked-by's for previous versions of the patch are meaningless, they are not added to the commit message, only those for the exact incarnation of the patch which gets committed.
So yes, it is possible to post
- A patch with only a Sign-off-by: You modified the code, but don't want it to be committed, yet.
- A patch with a Signed-off-by and an Acked-by: You modified the patch and you think it can be commited.
- An email with just an Acked-by: You didn't touch the patch at all, but you think it can be committed.
No comments, no objections? Shall I update the wiki with this procedure and shall we use it from now on?
I.e., you sign-off everything you touch or apply, you can ack your own patches, and any commit must get at least to acks (e.g. yours and that of one further developer).
I think I understand this now, and it is ok by me, if the line Commit appears in a message which is telling us a commit happened. I think it is important that we know if a patch has been committed. There have been some big patches lately that were in an undertermined state because they got signed off, and acked, and never committed, and i could not tell what had happened.
So if you have a thread, and you see signed-off and acked lines, but no commit lines, you can assume the patch was not committed. Right now, you just can not tell.
So if you signed off a patch, you are also going to ack it in the same email in most cases; this seems a little weird to me, I just assumed signed-off-by could apply acked-by, but I guess not?
thanks
ron