[PATCH 2/6] SubmittingPatches: discuss non-ident trailers

[kristofferhaugsbakk@fastmail.com]

From: Kristoffer Haugsbakk <code@khaugsbakk.name>

Briefly discuss trailers that do not credit people. This continues the
discussion from the previous commit about using trailers for *people*.

Using non-ident trailers can be relevant. The contributor should just be
encouraged to consider whether it is useful or not.

The larger trend here is to discourage using trailers as a dumping
ground for any kind of metadata in the spirit of “it doesn’t hurt”.

Signed-off-by: Kristoffer Haugsbakk <code@khaugsbakk.name>
---
 Documentation/SubmittingPatches | 5 ++++-
 1 file changed, 4 insertions(+), 1 deletion(-)

diff --git a/Documentation/SubmittingPatches b/Documentation/SubmittingPatches
index 0b12badf86d..51c308a89a8 100644
--- a/Documentation/SubmittingPatches
+++ b/Documentation/SubmittingPatches
@@ -474,7 +474,10 @@ These are the common trailers in use:
 
 While you can also create your own trailer if the situation warrants it, we
 encourage you to instead use one of the common trailers in this project
-highlighted above.
+highlighted above. A trailer that credits someone might be more likely
+to be accepted since these are the most common ones. But another kind of
+trailer might be relevant, for example to link to an issue tracker
+belonging to a downstream project that is affected by a bug in Git.
 
 Only capitalize the very first letter of the trailer, i.e. favor
 "Signed-off-by" over "Signed-Off-By" and "Acked-by:" over "Acked-By".
-- 
2.54.0.22.g9e26862b904