From: Linus Torvalds Date: Tue, 22 Nov 2005 05:33:41 GMT Subject: Re: Diffs "from" working directory Message-ID: 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