Hi Jesper, On Mon, Jul 11, 2011 at 2:21 AM, Jesper Juhl <jj@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > In any case, you can't expect people to base their Acked-by/Reviewed-by > replies on some conclusion in some email thread that happened years ago > but was never written down in some document in the repository. > It is only reasonable to expect people to behave according to the rules > laid out in SubmittingPatches and similar documents, and those rules > currently seem to support my interpretation, not yours. The definitions in SubmittingPatches are not hard rules and are, in fact, out of date. See Documentation/development-process/5.Posting for alternative definitions: - Acked-by: indicates an agreement by another developer (often a maintainer of the relevant code) that the patch is appropriate for inclusion into the kernel. and - Reviewed-by: the named developer has reviewed the patch for correctness; see the reviewer's statement in Documentation/SubmittingPatches for more detail. and then compare the dates for these definitions: 0f44cd23 (Andrew Morton 2007-06-08 13:46:45 -0700 401) Acked-by: is often used by the maintainer of the affected code when that 0f44cd23 (Andrew Morton 2007-06-08 13:46:45 -0700 402) maintainer neither contributed to nor forwarded the patch. 75b02146 (Jonathan Corbet 2008-09-30 15:15:56 -0600 205) - Acked-by: indicates an agreement by another developer (often a 75b02146 (Jonathan Corbet 2008-09-30 15:15:56 -0600 206) maintainer of the relevant code) that the patch is appropriate for 75b02146 (Jonathan Corbet 2008-09-30 15:15:56 -0600 207) inclusion into the kernel. So it is NOT reasonable 'to expect people to behave according to the rules laid out in SubmittingPatches and similar documents' because such documents have never had any hard rules! The documents are guidelines that attempt to document how things work here, not lay down the law. Pekka -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kbuild" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html