Re: [RFD] Explicitly documenting patch submission

Linus Torvalds
2004-05-25T03:50:35Z

On Mon, 24 May 2004, Albert Cahalan wrote:
>
> The wordy mix-case aspect is kind of annoying, and for
> all that we don't get to differentiate actions.

I actually really really don't want to differentiate actions. There's
really no reason to try to separate things out, and quite often the
actions are mixed anyway. Besides, if they all end up having the same
technical meaning ("I have the right to pass on this patch") having
separate flags is just sure to confuse the process.

So what I want is something _really_ simple. Something that is
unambigious, and cannot be confused with something else. And in
particular, I want that sign-off line to be "strange" enough that there is
no possibility of ever writing that line by mistake - so that it is clear
that the only reason anybody would write something like "Signed-off-by:"
is because it meant _that_ particular thing.

In contrast, your suggestion of "modified:" is something that people might
actually write when they write a changelog entry.

One reason for uniqueness is literally for automatic parsing - having
scripts that pick up on this, and send ACK messages, or do statistics on
who patches tend to go through etc etc.

Linus