Re: [PATCH] Teach applymbox to keep the Subject: line.

From: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
Date: Aug 17, 2005, 15:38 UTC
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.58.0508170830050.3553@g5.osdl.org>
In-Reply-To: <7vk6il2jz8.fsf_-_@assigned-by-dhcp.cox.net>

On Tue, 16 Aug 2005, Junio C Hamano wrote:

>
> This is a companion patch to the previous format-patch fix.
> With "-k", format-patch can be told not to remove the [PATCH] in
> the original commit, nor to add the [PATCH] on its own.

I think this might be the point in time to just make the "[PATCH]" prefix go away.

It made much more sense with BK than it does with git: since git keeps track of "author" and "committer" separately, you can always see when the committer wasn't the author of the change, which is what the "[PATCH]" thing was all about.

In other words, at least for the kernel, [PATCH] was a marker that said "the author didn't commit this directly". Git already has that information explicitly in the git data.

(Also, with proper "Signed-off-by:" lines it's also always clear that there were other people involved, and that the author of the patch is different from the person who applied it).

So I would personally not mind if we just made the "[PATCH]" prefix go away entirely, or perhaps had a separate flag to "git-applymbox" that told it to prepend a specific prefix to the Subject: line (which might not be "[PATCH] " at all) defaulting to "no prefix".

			Linus

PS. Another historical reason for marking patches explicitly was that people were worried that introducing BK would somehow make the old patch-based submissions be "second-class citizens". It was easy to make statistics and show that at least half the real changes (as opposed to merges) were still patch-based. So again, the "PATCH" marker had some historical relevance, but I don't think it matters any more.