Re: [PATCH 1/1] git-am: provide configuration to enable signoff by default

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Jun 1, 2011, 17:14 UTC
Message-ID: <7voc2hh3t5.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org>
In-Reply-To: <1306917751-27999-1-git-send-email-nsekhar@ti.com>

Sekhar Nori <nsekhar@ti.com> writes:

Show 6 quoted lines

> +am.signoff::
> +	A boolean value which lets you enable the `-s/--signoff` option of
> +	am by default. *Note:* Adding the Signed-off-by: line to a patch
> +	should be a conscious act and means that you certify you have
> +	the rights to submit this work under the same open source license.
> +	Please see the 'SubmittingPatches' document for further discussion.

I see you already have done your homework, which is much better than previous attempts by other people to add an option to add sign-off to various commands (commit and format-patch), but there are at least three problems here:

 * This is an end-user document, not a document for git developers, so
   they are not bound by SubmittingPatches at all. They do not necessarily
   have SubmittingPatches document in the first place;

 * Once you set this configuration variable, I do not see a way to
   countermand "This is not signed-off" from the command line for a single
   invocation of "am" in your patch;

 * If it should be a "conscious act", it shouldn't be "set once and forget
   about it" configuration option. You should be making the conscious
   decision for each piece of e-mail if it is in line with the project's
   Sign-off policy.

The last one means that the patch is internally inconsistent. In a project (not this project) where sign-off is used but it does not require signing off to be a conscious act, I see it may make sense to make it easier to sign-off a patch when generating (i.e. "commit -s"), preparing to send (i.e. "format-patch -s"), or accepting (i.e. "am -s"). And this option might be a possible way to do so. But in that case, the option description wouldn't say "it should be a conscious act".

Also if it doesn't have to be a conscious act, what value does such a boilerplate have? Such a project may be better off not using sign-off at all to begin with.