Re: [PATCH] git send-email: include [anything]-by: signatures

[Jeff King <peff@peff.net>]

On Sat, Aug 31, 2013 at 10:22:50PM +0300, Michael S. Tsirkin wrote:

> On Mon, Aug 26, 2013 at 07:57:47PM +0300, Michael S. Tsirkin wrote:
> > Consider [anything]-by: a valid signature.
> > This includes Tested-by: Acked-by: Reviewed-by: etc.
> > 
> > Signed-off-by: Michael S. Tsirkin <mst@redhat.com>
> 
> Ping.
> Any opinion on whether this change is acceptable?

I was left confused by your commit message, as it wasn't clear to me
what a "signature" is. But the point of it seems to be that people
mention others in commit messages using "X-by:" pseudo-headers besides
"signed-off-by", and you want to cc them along with the usual S-O-B.

That seems like a reasonable goal, but I have two concerns.

One, I would think the utility of this would be per-project, depending
on what sorts of things people in a particular project put in
pseudo-headers.  Grepping the kernel history shows that most X-by
headers have a person on the right-hand side, though quite often it is
not a valid email address (on the other hand, quite a few s-o-b lines in
the kernel do not have a valid email).

And two, the existing options for enabling/disabling this code all
explicitly mention signed-off-by, which becomes awkward. You did not
update the documentation in your patch, but I think you would end up
having to explain that "--supress-cc=sob" and "--signed-off-by-cc"
really mean "all pseudo-header lines ending in -by".

So I think it might be a nicer approach to introduce a new "suppress-cc"
class that means "all pseudo-header tokens ending in -by" or similar.
We might even want the new behavior on by default, but it would at least
give the user an escape hatch if their project generates a lot of false
positives.

-Peff