On Sep 22, 2009, at 4:28 PM, Wolfgang Denk wrote:
Dear Olof Johansson,
In message C6505381-97AC-4E05-9CCA-6089F69964D6@gmail.com you wrote:
Please feel free to do that, but I consider this just adding line-noise, unless you _really_ express special approval.
Which sense would it make if I added a s-o-b to each and every commit I'm pulling in from anywhere?
You're not pulling it, you are applying it. And the s-o-b is used to show the paper trail of who has touched it. So all you should need to backtrack the source of the code change is the list of the s-o-bs.
What is the difference between a "git pull" from some remote repo and the "git am" of a patch posted on the mailing list? In both cases I do _not_ touch the patch, and the result looks the same, too.
S-o-b is not an approval of the technical merits of the change. It's a pure bookkeeping measure to tell where a piece of code came from and who handled it on the way.
If the "handling" is just a technical operation which does not modify a single bit of the content I see no reason to add lines of s-o-b. Hey, I use several stages of repositories, and a number or branches here and there. Should I every time I pull from here or cherry-pick from there or format-patch + am somewhere else add a s-o-b? This makes zero sense to me.
I guess you don't see what the difference between applying a patch and pulling a tree is.
Anyway, it really doesn't matter much to me, it just confused me. It's your project and you can do with it as you please, there's no use in arguing over it. It just happens to be opposite to the principle of another large project using similar signed-off methods.
BUT in addition to this it's really useful for a newbie like me to see who to send a patch to, since it shows the list of maintainership (up to the first person that submits his work through git pulls, but that seems nonexistent for non-maintainers in u-boot anyway :)
Did you try looking at the list of custodians? http://www.denx.de/wiki/U-Boot/Custodians
I'm not saying there aren't other ways to do it, just that it's the one that made sense for me: Look at other files near where you are changing, and see the merge path.
-Olof