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Documentation/maintainer: rehome sign-off process 

The repeated sign-offs necessary when a subsystem maintainer modifies an
incoming patch has been moved from submitting-patches.rst to
Documentation/maintainer, since the affairs of a subsystem maintainer
are not especially relevant to someone reading a guide for how to submit
their first patch.

Signed-off-by: Drew DeVault <sir@cmpwn.com>
Link: https://lore.kernel.org/r/20200903160545.83185-4-sir@cmpwn.com
Signed-off-by: Jonathan Corbet <corbet@lwn.net>
This commit is contained in:
Drew DeVault 2020-09-03 12:05:44 -04:00 committed by Jonathan Corbet
parent 7433ff33e8
commit 4ebdf7be21
3 changed files with 51 additions and 46 deletions
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1
Documentation/maintainer/index.rst
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@ -13,4 +13,5 @@ additions to this manual.
rebasing-and-merging
pull-requests
maintainer-entry-profile
modifying-patches

50
Documentation/maintainer/modifying-patches.rst Normal file
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@ -0,0 +1,50 @@
.. _modifyingpatches:
Modifying Patches
=================
If you are a subsystem or branch maintainer, sometimes you need to slightly
modify patches you receive in order to merge them, because the code is not
exactly the same in your tree and the submitters'. If you stick strictly to
rule (c) of the developers certificate of origin, you should ask the submitter
to rediff, but this is a totally counter-productive waste of time and energy.
Rule (b) allows you to adjust the code, but then it is very impolite to change
one submitters code and make him endorse your bugs. To solve this problem, it
is recommended that you add a line between the last Signed-off-by header and
yours, indicating the nature of your changes. While there is nothing mandatory
about this, it seems like prepending the description with your mail and/or
name, all enclosed in square brackets, is noticeable enough to make it obvious
that you are responsible for last-minute changes. Example::
Signed-off-by: Random J Developer <random@developer.example.org>
[lucky@maintainer.example.org: struct foo moved from foo.c to foo.h]
Signed-off-by: Lucky K Maintainer <lucky@maintainer.example.org>
This practice is particularly helpful if you maintain a stable branch and
want at the same time to credit the author, track changes, merge the fix,
and protect the submitter from complaints. Note that under no circumstances
can you change the author's identity (the From header), as it is the one
which appears in the changelog.
Special note to back-porters: It seems to be a common and useful practice
to insert an indication of the origin of a patch at the top of the commit
message (just after the subject line) to facilitate tracking. For instance,
here's what we see in a 3.x-stable release::
Date: Tue Oct 7 07:26:38 2014 -0400
libata: Un-break ATA blacklist
commit 1c40279960bcd7d52dbdf1d466b20d24b99176c8 upstream.
And here's what might appear in an older kernel once a patch is backported::
Date: Tue May 13 22:12:27 2008 +0200
wireless, airo: waitbusy() won't delay
[backport of 2.6 commit b7acbdfbd1f277c1eb23f344f899cfa4cd0bf36a]
Whatever the format, this information provides a valuable help to people
tracking your trees, and to people trying to troubleshoot bugs in your
tree.

46
Documentation/process/submitting-patches.rst
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@ -474,52 +474,6 @@ Some people also put extra tags at the end. They'll just be ignored for
now, but you can do this to mark internal company procedures or just
point out some special detail about the sign-off.
If you are a subsystem or branch maintainer, sometimes you need to slightly
modify patches you receive in order to merge them, because the code is not
exactly the same in your tree and the submitters'. If you stick strictly to
rule (c), you should ask the submitter to rediff, but this is a totally
counter-productive waste of time and energy. Rule (b) allows you to adjust
the code, but then it is very impolite to change one submitter's code and
make him endorse your bugs. To solve this problem, it is recommended that
you add a line between the last Signed-off-by header and yours, indicating
the nature of your changes. While there is nothing mandatory about this, it
seems like prepending the description with your mail and/or name, all
enclosed in square brackets, is noticeable enough to make it obvious that
you are responsible for last-minute changes. Example::
Signed-off-by: Random J Developer <random@developer.example.org>
[lucky@maintainer.example.org: struct foo moved from foo.c to foo.h]
Signed-off-by: Lucky K Maintainer <lucky@maintainer.example.org>
This practice is particularly helpful if you maintain a stable branch and
want at the same time to credit the author, track changes, merge the fix,
and protect the submitter from complaints. Note that under no circumstances
can you change the author's identity (the From header), as it is the one
which appears in the changelog.
Special note to back-porters: It seems to be a common and useful practice
to insert an indication of the origin of a patch at the top of the commit
message (just after the subject line) to facilitate tracking. For instance,
here's what we see in a 3.x-stable release::
Date: Tue Oct 7 07:26:38 2014 -0400
libata: Un-break ATA blacklist
commit 1c40279960bcd7d52dbdf1d466b20d24b99176c8 upstream.
And here's what might appear in an older kernel once a patch is backported::
Date: Tue May 13 22:12:27 2008 +0200
wireless, airo: waitbusy() won't delay
[backport of 2.6 commit b7acbdfbd1f277c1eb23f344f899cfa4cd0bf36a]
Whatever the format, this information provides a valuable help to people
tracking your trees, and to people trying to troubleshoot bugs in your
tree.
When to use Acked-by:, Cc:, and Co-developed-by:
------------------------------------------------