Dear Stephen Warren,
In message 50770155.20700@wwwdotorg.org you wrote:
and in particular, the following parts of that doc is what tells me that committers should always add S-o-b even if the commit didn't change:
Developer's Certificate of Origin 1.1 By making a contribution to this project, I certify that:...
(c) The contribution was provided directly to me by some other person who certified (a), (b) or (c) and I have not modified it.
No, I think you misinterpret this ;-)
This is intended for cases where the original author of the patch shall remain unknown for whatever reasons. Consider some bigger companies doing a lot of their actual development in low-cost countries (say, China). They usually have a ton of developers workignon such stuff, and only one (or very few) people who "interface" ith the community. It is these interface-guys who will add their SoB based on above rule, meaning: yes, I can certify that this is Open Source, and even though the original author shall remain unnamed this can be used freely in this context.
I don't see how you derive fromt hat that a custodian applying a patch without modifications should add a SoB? If so, then please explain where the limits are? Aplying from a mailbox file from a mailing list? Or from some archive (say, patchwork)? Or pulling from some repository provided by the original author? Or pulling from a downstream repository in your own project?
Spinning this to an end consequently, I think we would have to add a new SoB line to all commits for any git pull we are doing (which caanot be the intention, and which cannot work).
Best regards,
Wolfgang Denk