[PATCH] Documentation: coding-assistants: add optional Acted-By: trailer

[PATCH] Documentation: coding-assistants: add optional Acted-By: trailer

[Blake Morrison]

The existing policy correctly separates AI tool attribution
(Assisted-by:) from legal accountability (Signed-off-by:). In practice,
contributors increasingly work across pseudonymous and legal-name
contexts, and a third slot -- identifying the human sovereign identity
under which the work was performed -- lets downstream tooling (CI,
provenance trackers, identity systems) bind a commit to a stable handle
without disturbing the DCO.

Add Acted-By: as an optional, informational companion trailer. It does
not replace Signed-off-by:, does not change DCO requirements, and does
not mandate any format; the out-of-tree
draft-morrison-identity-attributed-commits defines one such scheme, but
contributors are free to use any handle form they prefer.

The three trailers then map cleanly:

  * Assisted-by:    -- what tool drafted this
  * Acted-By:       -- who the human was, as a handle
  * Signed-off-by:  -- legal DCO attestation

This mirrors the informal separation already present in commits that
carry both a pseudonymous Reported-by: and a separate Signed-off-by:.

Signed-off-by: Blake Morrison <blake@truealter.com>
---
 Documentation/process/coding-assistants.rst | 13 +++++++++++++
 1 file changed, 13 insertions(+)

diff --git a/Documentation/process/coding-assistants.rst b/Documentation/process/coding-assistants.rst
index 899f4459c..b1d2d2f66 100644
--- a/Documentation/process/coding-assistants.rst
+++ b/Documentation/process/coding-assistants.rst
@@ -57,3 +57,16 @@ Basic development tools (git, gcc, make, editors) should not be listed.
 Example::
 
   Assisted-by: Claude:claude-3-opus coccinelle sparse
+
+Contributors may optionally add an ``Acted-By:`` tag identifying the
+human sovereign identity under which the work was performed, in a form
+stable across pseudonymous and legal-name contexts::
+
+  Acted-By: handle
+
+``Acted-By:`` is informational. It does not replace ``Signed-off-by:``;
+DCO attestation remains mandatory. Where ``Assisted-by:`` identifies
+*what tooling* contributed, ``Acted-By:`` identifies *who* the human
+was, as a stable handle. Handle format is out of scope for this
+document; draft-morrison-identity-attributed-commits in the IETF
+document stream describes one such scheme.
-- 
2.53.0

Re: [PATCH] Documentation: coding-assistants: add optional Acted-By: trailer

[Greg KH]

On Mon, Apr 20, 2026 at 02:27:46PM +0000, Blake Morrison wrote:
> The existing policy correctly separates AI tool attribution
> (Assisted-by:) from legal accountability (Signed-off-by:). In practice,
> contributors increasingly work across pseudonymous and legal-name
> contexts, and a third slot -- identifying the human sovereign identity
> under which the work was performed -- lets downstream tooling (CI,
> provenance trackers, identity systems) bind a commit to a stable handle
> without disturbing the DCO.
> 
> Add Acted-By: as an optional, informational companion trailer. It does
> not replace Signed-off-by:, does not change DCO requirements, and does
> not mandate any format; the out-of-tree
> draft-morrison-identity-attributed-commits defines one such scheme, but
> contributors are free to use any handle form they prefer.
> 
> The three trailers then map cleanly:
> 
>   * Assisted-by:    -- what tool drafted this
>   * Acted-By:       -- who the human was, as a handle

I really do not understand, how would this actually be used?

And as you have to have a signed-off-by, why would you use two different
names for yourself this way?

And who is asking for this?  Who would want to use it?  How would you
use it for this very commit?

confused,

greg k-h

Re: [PATCH] Documentation: coding-assistants: add optional Acted-By: trailer

[Blake]

On Tuesday, 21 April 2026 at 3:40 AM, Greg KH <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org> wrote:
> I really do not understand, how would this actually be used?

Git history uses email addresses as the de-facto identity key and
email addresses aren't stable across a lifetime or a career and,
increasingly, aren't meaningful even within a single commit.
Contributors move between employers and domains over time; companies
rename and migrate their workforce onto new domains; and plenty of
commits land with From: lines like blake@desktop or
root@localhost.localdomain because git's username@hostname fallback
fired before user.email was set.

.mailmap partially fixes the first case inside a single tree but
doesn't travel across repositories and can't synthesise an identity
where the From: never carried one. A declared Acted-By trailer gives
the human a stable key that survives employer changes, domain
migrations, misconfigured clients, and cross-tree lookups.

> And as you have to have a signed-off-by, why would you use two
> different names for yourself this way?

Signed-off-by and Acted-By answer different questions. Signed-off-by
requires a real name for DCO attestation. Acted-By names the stable
working identity the same human operates under across contexts —
which for most contributors on a stable setup collapses to the same
name, and the trailer adds nothing. They diverge when:

  - the same human contributes under different employer emails over
    a long career;
  - an employer renames and migrates its workforce to a new domain;
  - a contributor publishes under a stable pseudonym but their DCO
    Signed-off-by has to carry their legal name;
  - the From: line is machine-generated noise (blake@desktop,
    user@hostname) and carries no identity information at all.

> And who is asking for this?  Who would want to use it?  How would
> you use it for this very commit?

For this very commit I wouldn't need it as Signed-off-by is
sufficient. The patch defines a slot in the docs; the commits that
benefit from the slot are other commits in other trees where the
divergence cases above bite. Pseudonymous contributors and
long-career maintainers whose email addresses have changed are the
current constituency; anyone writing provenance or review-routing
tooling that today falls back on email-fuzzing is the other.

If the sense is that optional trailers with narrow audiences don't
earn a footnote in coding-assistants.rst, I'm happy to withdraw and
keep this out-of-tree.

thanks,
Blake

Re: [PATCH] Documentation: coding-assistants: add optional Acted-By: trailer

[Vlastimil Babka]

On 4/21/26 03:04, Blake wrote:
> On Tuesday, 21 April 2026 at 3:40 AM, Greg KH <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org> wrote:
>> I really do not understand, how would this actually be used?
>> And as you have to have a signed-off-by, why would you use two
>> different names for yourself this way?
> 
> Signed-off-by and Acted-By answer different questions. Signed-off-by
> requires a real name for DCO attestation.

AFAIU that's an outdated claim. See:

https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/commit/?id=d4563201f33a022fc0353033d9dfeb1606a88330
 

Re: [PATCH] Documentation: coding-assistants: add optional Acted-By: trailer

[Konstantin Ryabitsev]

On Mon, Apr 20, 2026 at 02:27:46PM +0000, Blake Morrison wrote:
> The existing policy correctly separates AI tool attribution
> (Assisted-by:) from legal accountability (Signed-off-by:). In practice,
> contributors increasingly work across pseudonymous and legal-name
> contexts, and a third slot -- identifying the human sovereign identity
> under which the work was performed -- lets downstream tooling (CI,
> provenance trackers, identity systems) bind a commit to a stable handle
> without disturbing the DCO.
> 
> Add Acted-By: as an optional, informational companion trailer. It does
> not replace Signed-off-by:, does not change DCO requirements, and does
> not mandate any format; the out-of-tree
> draft-morrison-identity-attributed-commits defines one such scheme, but
> contributors are free to use any handle form they prefer.

This is fairly orthogonal to what LF is already attempting to do with OpenVTC
(https://github.com/OpenVTC). I'm giving this a NACK for now, not because I'm
trying to stifle this work, but because it's going at it from the wrong angle.
The "Acted-by" trailer is clearly intended to be a field for a cryptographic
hash, not for a name/email combo.

As such, it will most likely never be accepted by the kernel community for the
same reason the community rejected the Change-ID trailer -- it's an obscure
string of characters that requires specialized tooling to parse.

Reading the IETF proposal, this is just one of the trailers proposed, as the
following are also mentioned in the draft:

   1. Acted-By:
   2. Executed-By:
   3. Drafted-With:
   4. Identity-Signature:
   5. Identity-Key-Id:
   6. Identity-Anchor:

I see that they need to be "optionally provided" but I can guarantee you that
a maintainer that sees a patch submission with a slew of trailers like that
will reject it (and you will get an earful from Linus).

I recommend that instead of starting by introducing a new trailer on the kernel
list, you send your overall scheme proposal to the git list instead. Some of
the claims in the draft are questionable (e.g. that tree hashes survive
rebase or cherry-pick operations), and are specifically suspect within the
context of the kernel's patch-based workflow. A tree-hash for a patch created
by the submitter will almost certainly become invalid when the maintainer runs
"git am" on their series, so the proposed scheme will never really work for
the kernel, because the vast majority of cryptographic hashes will never
validate.

So, NACK for now, and I do recommend you start on the git list instead.

-K