Re: Diffs "from" working directory

> 
> On Tue, 22 Nov 2005, Chuck Lever wrote:
> 
>>for some reason i was under the impression that it would parse the
>>Signed-off-by: fields in the patch description, and take the first one as the
>>patch author.
> 
> 
> The first sign-off really isn't necessarily the author.
> 
> It might be a company sign-off (many companies don't want any random 
> engineer to send out patches), but much more commonly it's a trivial patch 
> that somebody else signs off on, even if the original patcher didn't (see 
> case (b) in the sign-off-rules: you can sign of on somebody elses work if 
> you know it's under the GPL).

> So the fact that there was a sign-off procedure doesn't automatically mean 
> that the author will be the first sign-off person, although in _practice_ 
> that obviously would likely always be the most common case by far.
> 
> (Another reason is that some people actually add the sign-offs above 
> previous ones. It happens, although if I notice, I try to point it out).
> 
> So authorship really is totally separate from sign-off, and all _my_ tools 
> take the authorship from the first "From:" line at the top of the message 
> body or from the email itself.