From: Chuck Lever Date: Tue, 22 Nov 2005 18:03:58 GMT Subject: Re: Diffs "from" working directory Message-ID: <43835D8E.60109@citi.umich.edu> In-Reply-To: Linus Torvalds wrote: > > 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). heh. in fact that is what my company (NetApp) requires. > 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. then perhaps the problem is that the "stg mail" tool should place the author in the From: field automatically? (ie change the tool, or permanently modify the default template that comes with StGIT to do this, as Catalin suggested earlier). that seems a little twisty to me; you're overloading the SMTP header field instead of explicitly specifying patch authorship. seems like a layering violation. begin:vcard fn:Chuck Lever n:Lever;Charles org:Network Appliance, Incorporated;Linux NFS Client Development adr:535 West William Street, Suite 3100;;Center for Information Technology Integration;Ann Arbor;MI;48103-4943;USA email;internet:cel@citi.umich.edu title:Member of Technical Staff tel;work:+1 734 763-4415 tel;fax:+1 734 763 4434 tel;home:+1 734 668-1089 x-mozilla-html:FALSE url:http://www.monkey.org/~cel/ version:2.1 end:vcard