Re: [GIT PULL] ftrace: Rewrite of function graph to allow multiple users

[Mathieu Desnoyers <mathieu.desnoyers@efficios.com>]

On 18-Jul-2024 06:55:47 PM, Steven Rostedt wrote:
> On Thu, 18 Jul 2024 14:54:11 -0700
> Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org> wrote:
> 
> > On Thu, 18 Jul 2024 at 14:29, Steven Rostedt <rostedt@goodmis.org> wrote:
> > >
> > > Basically, it's just to show who owns the copyright.  
> > 
> > .. but since basically nobody else does that, it's worthless.
> > 
> > You'd have to go back to the email address and date range *anyway* for
> > everybody else, so you doing it adds no value - and everybody doing it
> > would be just hugely annoying.
> > 
> > End result: unless there's some actual company policy, please just
> > don't do this. Because your "copyright" excuse is clearly just empty
> > words.
> 
> It was also a way to give credit to the ones that pay me. But whatever.
> I've been doing this since 2013, not sure why it is now such an annoyance.
> Was it just because patches that have been living in my repo since I was at
> VMware finally made it forward so that both companies showed up in one pull
> request? Or has this always been an annoyance?
> 
> I'll remove it, but it just feels wrong to me, as I'm no longer giving
> credit to the one funding my work, and I have no plans on switching to my
> google email.
> 
> Note, I have commits with it already, so this change will only happen for
> new code.

There appears to be three sets of constraints here:

1) The code author/maintainer wishes to use an email address that stays
   valid across employers (name@kernel.org is another example of this),
   which is a way to stay reliably reachable over his entire career,

2) The employer requires attribution for tracking copyright ownership.
   This is typically done by requiring employees to use their corporate
   email address for code submissions, which is incompatible with (1).

3) Adding the employer in the form "First Last (Employer)" as a
   work-around creates separate author entries in the git shortlog.

I see a few possible solutions there:

- We can teach git to know about this "First Last (Employer)" formatting
  and combine duplicates.

- We can move the employer attribution to the email address instead,
  e.g.: name.corp@kernel.org or name+corp@kernel.org (or whatever we
  figure out looks OK).

Thoughts ?

Thanks,

Mathieu

-- 
Mathieu Desnoyers
EfficiOS Inc.
http://www.efficios.com