Re: [PATCH v1] checkpatch: Warn about sign offs if there's an accidental patch separator

[Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>]

On Mon, 5 Jan 2026 09:13:49 -0800 Ian Rogers <irogers@google.com> wrote:

> On Mon, Jan 5, 2026 at 8:46 AM Joe Perches <joe@perches.com> wrote:
> >
> > On Mon, 2026-01-05 at 07:39 -0800, Ian Rogers wrote:
> > > I was the author of it. The patch passed checkpatch.pl but then
> > > created a commit with missing tags - ie it was broken. This patch is
> > > fixing this issue so that checkpatch.pl will warn about the missing
> > > tags prior to the patch being sent to LKML, which is kind of
> > > checkpatch.pl's purpose. This is all detailed in the commit message.
> >
> > Whatever was the tool that applied the patch should be fixed instead.
> 
> The tool was git. As I mentioned, we can patch git but old versions
> will still have the '^---' rather than '^---$' behavior and so these
> checkpatch.pl tests remain useful.
> 

I was bitten by this recently.  Someone's changelog had

----------- stuff here

and git-quiltimport remove half the changelog and all the metadata.

git is wrong.  I say so coz I invented the --- convention. 
submitting-patches.rst says

	  - A marker line containing simply ``---``.

The astonishingly old https://www.ozlabs.org/~akpm/stuff/tpp.txt says
"...  scripts will treat a ^--- string as ...".  I regret not
explicitly using "^---$".

I'd like checkpatch to emit a warning in this case.  If a line starts
with --- then please let's warn the user that downstream tooling will
screw this up.