Re: Question about commit message conventions

[Andreas Ericsson <ae@op5.se>]

Erik Mouw wrote:
> On Tue, Oct 24, 2006 at 03:49:44PM +0200, Tobias Toedter wrote:
> 
>> On the other hand, concerning the approval of other developers, what's the 
>> difference between "Signed-off-by:" and "Acked-by:"? Are there any 
>> more "*-by:" fields that are in use?
> 
> Acked-by is usually used when someone (not the upstream maintainer the
> patch was send to) agrees with the patch. I.e.: (s)he says the content
> of the patch is OK without actually acknowledging something about the
> right to submit.
> 

If you sift through the Linux kernel, you will find numerous patches 
where subsystem maintainers have acked patches sent to them. I *think* 
this usually means that they have reviewed the patch and approve of it, 
but not modified it. The Ack is then solely for Linus' benefits and 
tells him that at least one pair of eyes have already gone over the patch.

Subsys maintainers sometimes also add Signed-off-by: lines, which I 
assume means they have tweaked the patch somewhat or somehow 
collaborated with the author in producing it. I know Junio signs off 
patches he modifies, and I'm guessing this habit is inherited from the 
kernel workflow which was most likely encouraged by Linus when he was 
the Git maintainer.

Lots of guesswork here, but in a sane world I can't be too far off the 
mark ;-)

-- 
Andreas Ericsson                   andreas.ericsson@op5.se
OP5 AB                             www.op5.se