Hi All, The primary aim of this email is that I'd like to improve the quality of credit that we are giving people for the vital job or reviewing patches. This is a quick(ish) email to try and clear up my interpretation of when various review tags are appropriate. This follows on from a discussion as part of the kernel summit pre discussion. In particular, one issue that was raised there was how to give credit where credit is due for reviews. There are some proposals to add the option for patch authors to explicitly credit anyone who pointed out bugs in their earlier versions, but those may or may not come to anything. There may well be a formal statement from the kernel summit (probably a clarification to submittingpatches) but then there may be no clear opinion and as with many kernel aspects it will be left to individual maintainers. Anyhow, another aspect was the uses various maintainers are making of Acked-by vs Reviewed-by. As such I thought I would clarify my understanding (which has changed somewhat as a result of those discussions). Comments of course most welcome! Our standard tags; Signed-off-by: This is part of the developer certificate of origin stuff. If you sign-off you are making an explicit statement that either you wrote the code or it passed through your hands and to the best of your knowledge you are not breaking license terms etc (this includes me for example certifying that I have made no changes that would invalidate earlier sign offs) This is the one with some legal meaning and I think we are all using it correctly (just here for completeness). Note that this also either implies that you have 'reviewed' the code in detail, or that you are happy that the deep review has already been done by someone you trust. (and it's this last bit that lets the Linux development process scale). There is a pretty universal view that you don't bother with both signed-off-by and any other tag (though tested-by can be appropriate in my view). Acked-by: This is kind of a looks fine to me / I am happy with this tag. Has a couple of common uses: 1) Driver author / maintainer is saying they are happy with someone else's change. Note this includes me as IIO maintainer saying I am happy for another maintainer to apply stuff to the IIO tree (where cross subsystem series make this sensible). 2) For small changes where 'review' is not really relevant. e.g. Typo fixes. Must be provided by the person who wishes to express this opinion (note the difference from reviewed by below). Tested-by: Does what is says on the tin. If you have the hardware and run a new patch to check it works then send a tested-by. Note that it is absolutely encouraged to send a tested-by and an ack/reviewed by. I always want more tested-by:s as they give me a warm fuzzy feeling about a patch. If someone informally mentions they tested something I'll normally poke them to give the tag as well. Reviewed-by: Now this is the one that caused most discussion in the previously mentioned thread. When is it appropriate? 1) When substantial work has been applied as part of a review. This might be indicated by a series of suggested changes or by detailed comments on what they think is good / bad might be done differently. In these cases the reviewer may 'suggest' the tag themselves. 2) Where earlier versions of a patch have received substantial review but the reviewer has not commented on the latest version. In this case some maintainers have been giving 'Reviewed-by' tags to people who haven't supplied them on their own. This is the change I would like to make to how I have done things previously (where when I had time I pestered people to give a reviewed-by). A few of you delight in early stage reviews and I feel often get little or no permanent credit for your hard work. In particular there are some here who spend a lot of time helping new submitters get large patches in order. A job that can take a huge amount of work on occasion! So does anyone object if I sometimes add Reviewed-by tags for them? Obviously this is all going to be a little arbitrary so do keep sending them directly (and authors keep adding them to later versions of your patches!) Anyhow, the thread that lead to this has yet again reminded me of how lucky I am and we all are in IIO wrt to the quality and quantity of reviewers who put huge amounts of time into improving all our code! I certainly know I would have burnt out long ago if it was just me against the mountain. I'm going to be on holiday week after next. Should get back to normal in early August. Thanks, Jonathan -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-iio" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
