Re: [PATCH v2 1/3] docs: introduce dedicated page about code provenance / sign-off

[Thomas Huth <thuth@redhat.com>]

On 16/05/2024 19.43, Peter Maydell wrote:
> On Thu, 16 May 2024 at 18:34, Michael S. Tsirkin <mst@redhat.com> wrote:
>>
>> On Thu, May 16, 2024 at 06:29:39PM +0100, Peter Maydell wrote:
>>> On Thu, 16 May 2024 at 17:22, Daniel P. Berrangé <berrange@redhat.com> wrote:
>>>>
>>>> Currently we have a short paragraph saying that patches must include
>>>> a Signed-off-by line, and merely link to the kernel documentation.
>>>> The linked kernel docs have a lot of content beyond the part about
>>>> sign-off an thus are misleading/distracting to QEMU contributors.
>>>
>>> Thanks for this -- I've felt for ages that it was a bit awkward
>>> that we didn't have a good place to link people to for the fuller
>>> explanation of this.
>>>
>>>> This introduces a dedicated 'code-provenance' page in QEMU talking
>>>> about why we require sign-off, explaining the other tags we commonly
>>>> use, and what to do in some edge cases.
>>>
>>> The version of the kernel SubmittingPatches we used to link to
>>> includes the text "sorry, no pseudonyms or anonymous contributions".
>>> This new documentation doesn't say anything either way about
>>> our approach to pseudonyms. I think we should probably say
>>> something, but I don't know if we have an in-practice consensus
>>> there, so maybe we should approach that as a separate change on
>>> top of this patch.
>>
>>
>> Well given we referred to kernel previously then I guess that's
>> the concensus, no?
> 
> AIUI the kernel devs have changed their point of view on the
> pseudonym question, so it's a question of whether we were
> deliberately referring to that specific revision of the kernel's
> practice because we agreed with it or just by chance...
> 
> https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/next/linux-next.git/commit/?id=d4563201f33a022fc0353033d9dfeb1606a88330
> 
> is where the kernel changed to saying merely "no anonymous
> contributions", dropping the 'pseudonyms' part.

FWIW, we had a clear statement in our document in the past:

https://gitlab.com/qemu-project/qemu/-/commit/ca127fe96ddb827f3ea153610c1e8f6e374708e2#9620a1442f724c9d8bfd5408e4611ba1839fcb8a_315_321

Quoting: "Please use your real name to sign a patch (not an alias or acronym)."

But it got lost in that rework, I assume by accident?

So IMHO we had a consensus once to not allow anonymous contributions. I'm in 
favor of adding such a sentence back here now.

  Thomas