On Tue, 07 Feb 2023 17:18:27 +0000, Paul Liu paul.liu@linaro.org wrote:
Hi Marc,
I think you are the author. I'm just making some minor fixes and then upstreaming to the mailing list. What is the correct way to make the Signed-off-by list?
In general, and unless you have completely rewritten the patch (it doesn't seem so in this particular case), you should keep the original authorship and sign-off chain, and add your own Signed-off-by: tag *after* the previous ones.
You should also document what changes you have made, if any, when picking up the patch.
When posting it, it should read something like:
<quote> From: Random Developer rd@ilikesoup.org
Fix foo handling in bar().
Signed-off-by: Random Developer rd@ilikesoup.org Signed-off-by: Random Committer rc@gimmecheese.net [Paul: picked from the FooBar tree, fixed the return value for bar() and rebased to upstream] Signed-off-by: Paul Liu paul.liu@linaro.org Link: https://git.foobar.com/commit/?df2d85d0b0b5b1533d6db9079f0a0a7b73ef6a34 </quote>
where "Random Developer" is the original author, and "Random Committer" is someone who picked up the patch the first place. The important thing here is that, just by looking at the sign-off chain, you can tell how the patch has been handled.
The additional information (enclosed in square bracket) is optional but much appreciated by the reviewers, and so is the link to the original patch, which helps seeing it in context.
If the commits have lost the original authorship (which sometimes happen as you rebase patches and resolve conflicts), you can fix it with:
git commit --amend --author="Random Developer rd@ilikesoup.org"
on each individual commit.
Tom's email also has a good pointer to what is expected from contributors (most of which is applicable to a large number of open-source projects).
Hope this helps,
M.