Re: ALSA official git repository

From: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
Date: May 27, 2005, 22:06 UTC
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.58.0505271502240.17402@ppc970.osdl.org>
In-Reply-To: <20050527135124.0d98c33e.akpm@osdl.org>

On Fri, 27 May 2005, Andrew Morton wrote:

Show 20 quoted lines

>
> Yes, I'll occasionally do patches which were written by "A" as:
> 
> From: A
> ...
> Signed-off-by: B
> 
> And that comes through email as:
> 
> 
> ...
> From: <akpm@osdl.org>
> ...
> From: A
> ...
> Signed-off-by: B
> 
> 
> which means that the algorithm for identifying the author is "the final
> From:".

No, the algorithm is:
 - the email author, _or_ if there is one, the top "From:" in the body.

And the rule is that you never remove (or add to) an existing From:, since the author doesn't change from being passed around.

Put another way: authorship is very different from sign-off. The sign-off gets stacked, the authorship is constant, and thus the rules are different.

Also, authorship is more important than sign-off-ship, so authorship goes at the top, while sign-offs go at the bottom.

> I guess the bug here is the use of From: to identify the primary author,
> because transporting the patch via email adds ambiguity.

No it doesn't, the email "from" just ends up being the "default" if no explicit authorship is noted.

> Maybe we should introduce "^Author:"?

It would still have the same rules, so it wouldn't change anything but the tag, so I don't think there is any real advantage to it.

		Linus