Subject: Re: [PATCH] Add a config option to add a comment to S-o-b lines

From: Junio C Hamano <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 20 Mar 2026 15:36:09 -0700

Junio C Hamano <[email-masked]> writes:

> Uwe Kleine-König <[email-masked]> writes:
>
>> As an employee of a consultant company I'm often requested to mention
>> the customer name in the Signed-off-by line. Add a config knob
>> "user.signoffcomment" to configure this and use it in automatically
>> generated S-o-b lines.
>>
>> Signed-off-by: Uwe Kleine-König (The Capable Hub) <[email-masked]>
>> ---
>
> I know it is not the thrust of this patch, but I think you should
> think about this question at the same time, eh, rather, I do not
> think we want to add a feature like this without thinking things
> like the following through:
>
> How should this practice interact with commands like "git log
> --author=", "git shortlog", and friends?
>
> Would projects accepting contributions signed like so want to have a
> feature to easily strip the comments without having to add new
> entries to their .mailmap every time a known contributor works for a
> new client?
>
> And then there is a question of "what shape of comment do we want?
> is it OK for us to dictate that it comes after the author's human
> readable name identity enclosed in parentheses?".
>
> Shouldn't interpret-trailers be a good place to do this, instead of
> a configuration option?

Another tangent.  Stepping back a bit, these names and e-mail
addresses come from:

    [user]
	name = Uwe Kleine-König
	email = u.kleine-koenig@...

It is plausible that a single user may want to use different
identities depending on where the identities are used.  It may take
a form of three-level configuration variable name, i.e.,

    user.<context>.name
    user.<context>.email

where obvious candidates for <context> are things like "author"
(used for commit author ident), "committer", and "tagger".

It is not too inconceivable to have an entry dedicated for
"sign-off", perhaps in addition to the above user.{name,email}
entries you already have in your $HOME/.gitconfig, you may throw
something like this in the project .git/config file:

    [user "sign-off"]
	name = Uwe Kleine-König (Current Sponsor)

ident.c::fmt_ident() and ident.c::fmt_name() take "enum want_ident"
that lets our callers say "I want AUTHOR_IDENT" etc., and it would
be natural to extend the set of WANT_*_IDENT enumeration to support
more kind of names, if we really wanted to.

Having said that, wishing to be known under different identities to
different communities is one thing, but I am not yet convinced that
it is a good idea to use different identities in a single project
depending where the ident appears.

Thanks.