From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S264541AbUEYDuf (ORCPT ); Mon, 24 May 2004 23:50:35 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S264543AbUEYDue (ORCPT ); Mon, 24 May 2004 23:50:34 -0400 Received: from fw.osdl.org ([65.172.181.6]:56499 "EHLO mail.osdl.org") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S264541AbUEYDub (ORCPT ); Mon, 24 May 2004 23:50:31 -0400 Date: Mon, 24 May 2004 20:50:28 -0700 (PDT) From: Linus Torvalds To: Albert Cahalan cc: linux-kernel mailing list Subject: Re: [RFD] Explicitly documenting patch submission In-Reply-To: <1085439926.951.971.camel@cube> Message-ID: References: <1085439926.951.971.camel@cube> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org 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