Re: introduce --signoff ?

[Jake Farrell]

--signoff would be appropriate use in this case as the committer is directly involved with the delivery if the patch from the --author and the --author has granted use of that work to the ASF by attaching the patch to an issue within Jira at issues.apache.org.   Since contributors do not necessarily have an ICLA's on file the committer is the one responsible for marking the work being committed as "Submitted on behalf of a third-party: [named here]", see Apache ICLA section 7. We currently comply with this with our commits having "Patch: [named here]". As I am unaware of any other project doing this and it is a change to how code is submitted back to the ASF we should bounce off board/legal to cover all bases if we go down the path of an official proposal and vote on this. Finally, if we do consider switching the author and using signing to note the committer then I think we need to look at using gpg signatures as well to validate that the commit has truly come from a trusted committer. This will add a number of additional steps for new committers and existing ones who do not have a gpg key created and published, currently we only have 6.  -Jake References: - http://www.apache.org/dev/committers.html#applying-patches - http://www.apache.org/licenses/icla.pdf Evan Nemerson June 20, 2013 7:16 PM I may be misunderstanding your intent here, but I believe this is still somewhat non-standard usage of Signed-off-by. Typically it is used to indicate that someone either wrote it and/or have the right to open-source the contribution. See the Linux kernel's documentation here: https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/SubmittingPatches (section 12). I think what you're really after is "Acked-by" (or possibly "Tested-by" or "Reviewed-by"), which is described in section 13 of that document. If all you want is to signify who actually committed the patch, that information is already retained by git. It doesn't show up in `git log` by default, but `git log --format=full` will show it, as will gitweb and cgit. As long as on the subject, most open source projects try to limit the subject of the patch to 72 characters (or another number in the 70-75 range), and include the relevant component. If a longer description is necessary that goes in subsequent lines. Finally, the bug information comes at the end. So, that commit would look something like this: $ git commit --author "Cross Everything <wo...@example.com>" --signoff Note the absence of -m. Then, in your editor (nano, vi, emacs, etc... see the "ENVIRONMENT AND CONFIGURATION VARIABLES" section in the git-commit man page for details) enter in the commit message, which would be something like: cpp: fix warning on 64-bit platforms about truncating rlim_t to int A longer description of the problem and/or solution could go here if the subject is insufficient to convey everything. THRIFT-2024 Instead of "THRIFT-2024", many (most?) projects use an actual link to the bug in question instead of just the bug number, which is quite convenient. -Evan Roger Meier June 20, 2013 5:53 PM yes, you are right. git commit --signoff --author="Cross Everything <wo...@example.com>" -a -m "THRIFT-XXXX lang: description" does the trick! I've just tested it here including also signoff: https://git-wip-us.apache.org/repos/asf?p=thrift.git;a=commit;h=cc25c52de4fc1d9d856a759b283ff96a6c251c29 https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/THRIFT-2024 update here: http://thrift.apache.org/docs/HowToContribute ? -roger Quoting Carl Yeksigian <c...@yeksigian.com>: Carl Yeksigian June 19, 2013 8:39 PM I think it might be better attribution to use --author="(author)", if this is for attribution. That way the authorship can go to the person who authored the patch; committer will remain the committer's name. Just for a preview, I just made a test commit to a review branch on my github, so if interested in what that might look like: https://github.com/carlyeks/thrift/commit/2f96496856710c4bbff1890241b064561e0da2c6 On Jun 20, 2013, at 12:44 AM, Roger Meier <ro...@bufferoverflow.ch> wrote: what about using the signoff feature for contributions? git commit --signoff -a -m "THRIFT-XXXX lang: description" roger ;-r Roger Meier June 19, 2013 6:43 PM what about using the signoff feature for contributions? git commit --signoff -a -m "THRIFT-XXXX lang: description" roger ;-r