Re: [RFD] Explicitly documenting patch submission

Arjan van de Ven
2004-05-23T15:36:07Z

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On Sun, May 23, 2004 at 08:25:40AM -0700, Greg KH wrote:
> On Sun, May 23, 2004 at 10:02:17AM +0200, Arjan van de Ven wrote:
> > On Sun, 2004-05-23 at 08:46, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> > > Hola!
> > >
> > > This is a request for discussion..
> >
> > Can we make this somewhat less cumbersome even by say, allowing
> > developers to file a gpg key and sign a certificate saying "all patches
> > that I sign with that key are hereby under this regime". I know you hate
> > it but the FSF copyright assignment stuff at least has such "do it once
> > for forever" mechanism making the pain optionally only once.
>
> I don't think that adding a single line to ever patch description is
> really "pain". Especially compared to the FSF proceedure :)
>
> Also, gpg signed patches are a pain to handle on the maintainer's side
> of things, speaking from personal experience. However our patch
> handling scripts could probably just be modified to fix this issue, but
> no one's stepped up to do it.

I'll buy that

> And we'd have to start messing with the
> whole "web of trust" thing, which would keep us from being able to
> accept a patch from someone in a remote location with no way of being
> able to add their key to that web, causing _more_ work to be done to get
> a patch into the tree than Linus's proposal entails.

But I don't buy this. No web of trust is needed if all that is happening is
filing a form ONCE saying "all patch submissions signed with THIS key are
automatically certified". That doesn't prevent non-gpg users from using the
proposed mechanism nor involves web of trust metrics.

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