Subject: Re: [PATCH v3 0/4] clarify meaning of --signoff & related doc improvements in describing Signed-off-by

From: "Bradley M. Kuhn" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 20 Oct 2020 14:28:20 -0700

Taylor Blau wrote:
> Thanks; I think some of our emails crossed over one another, but this
> version looks good to me.

Yes, I was preparing the patch when you wrote that you disagreed with Junio
and preferred the ":".

FWIW, I left the ":" anywhere headers were being discussed and those headers
were described with ":"s on them.  I only changed places where
"Signed-off-by:" stood alone.

Before my v3 patchset, usage was inconsistent about (roughly half/half), so
the decision is mostly a coin toss.  I didn't have a strong opinion when I
was first writing the v3 patchset, but having thought about it overnight, I
now think leaving the ":" *out* is better because a reader new to Git is more
likely to think a ":" is punctuation, rather than being part of a moniker.
Thus, IMO, leaving out the ":" in most cases probably improves readability.

The remainder of this email is purely an edification question that may help
serve to improve Documentation/SubmittingPatches:

> I'd be happy to discard what's currently in seen (integrated as 1b98087e0f
> (Merge branch 'bk/sob-dco' into jch, 2020-10-19 at the time of writing) in
> favor of what's here.

I wasn't sure what I should be doing with the patch set once it was already
in 'seen'.  The only two references in SubmittingPatches I could find were:

>From Documentation/SubmittingPatches:
>> In any time between the (2)-(3) cycle, the maintainer may pick it up from
>> the list and queue it to `seen`, in order to make it easier for people
>> play with it without having to pick up and apply the patch to their trees
>> themselves.

and

>> `git pull --rebase` will automatically skip already-applied patches, and
>> will let you know. This works only if you rebase on top of the branch in
>> which your patch has been merged (i.e. it will not tell you if your patch
>> is merged in `seen` if you rebase on top of master).

The former hints that you *shouldn't* change the workflow if some of your
patchset is in `seen`, and the latter hints that maybe you should, but
neither section tells you what to do differently, if anything, once your
patches are in `seen`.

I'm curious to know if I went wrong somewhere and the workflow and would be
glad to propose another patch to improve SubmittingPatches with a section of
what to do when patches show up in `seen`, but since I'm a n00b (at least as
an upstream Git contributor :), I'd need to know how to DTRT in this case to
do that.
--
Bradley M. Kuhn - he/him
Policy Fellow & Hacker-in-Residence at Software Freedom Conservancy
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