Re: [PATCH 1/2] docs: introduce dedicated page about code provenance / sign-off

[Daniel P . Berrangé]

On Mon, Jan 29, 2024 at 10:41:38AM +0000, Peter Maydell wrote:
> On Mon, 29 Jan 2024 at 09:47, Samuel Tardieu <sam@rfc1149.net> wrote:
> > However, this is not what QEMU has been using as far as I can see,
> > as S-o-b tend to stay in their original positions. I even opened
> > an issue on b4 a few weeks ago because of this
> > <https://github.com/mricon/b4/issues/16>, and I reverted to using
> > git-publish. But if this is ok to use an arbitrary order for
> > non-S-o-b headers, I can get back to b4.
> 
> I think QEMU doesn't have a specific existing practice here.
> What you see is largely the result of people using whatever
> tooling they have and accepting the ordering it gives them.
> So I don't think you should stop using b4 just because
> the ordering it happens to produce isn't the same as
> somebody else's tooling.
> 
> I think trying to impose some subtle distinction of meaning
> on the ordering of tags is not going to work, because there
> are going to be too many cases where people don't adhere
> to the ordering distinction because they don't know about
> it or don't understand it.
> 
> As Daniel says, as long as the Signed-off-by tags are
> in basically the right order for developer vs maintainer
> that's the only strong ordering constraint we have.

To think of it another way....

Signed-off-by is the only tag which has defined legal meaning
in terms of asserting that the people involved have permission
to contribute.

All the other tags (Reviewed/Tested/etc) are merely a historical
record of the development process, and have no legal implications.

This makes Signed-off-by the important one, and the others all
in the "nice to have" category.

With regards,
Daniel
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