Re: Diffs "from" working directory

From: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
Date: Nov 22, 2005, 05:33 UTC
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.64.0511212124160.13959@g5.osdl.org>
In-Reply-To: <4382A972.1010801@citi.umich.edu>

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.

			Linus