Re: [patch 0/9] vmalloc fixes and improvements

Linus Torvalds
2008-11-08T17:37:13Z

On Sat, 8 Nov 2008, Nick Piggin wrote:
>
> I thought when there is no From in the body, then it defaults to the first
> Signed-off-by:

Nope. It defaults to the sender. The first signed-off is _usually_ the
right choice, and you can use that as a sanity double-check, but I really
avoid using it for authorship. We actually did that at one point, and it
was reasonably often seriously screwed up and mis-attributed things.

[ It happened either because the first point in the chain had been some
trivial thing that got picked up without sign-off, or because the patch
had actually gone back-and-forth and the author signed off after testing
or improvements.

The first case has been getting fairly rare as people get so used to
sign-offs, but it still happens. The second case has always been pretty
rare, but I'd still rather have it as a "sanity check" than a "blind
heuristic" ]

Linus