Subject: Re: linux-next: Signed-off-by missing for commit in the rdma-fixes tree

From: Joe Perches <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 08 Mar 2018 09:23:12 -0800

On Thu, 2018-03-08 at 10:03 -0700, Jason Gunthorpe wrote:
> On Thu, Mar 08, 2018 at 08:39:38AM -0800, Joe Perches wrote:
> > On Thu, 2018-03-08 at 09:18 -0700, Jason Gunthorpe wrote:
> > > On Thu, Mar 08, 2018 at 04:40:58PM +1100, Stephen Rothwell wrote:
> > > > Hi all,
> > > > 
> > > > Commit
> > > > 
> > > >   aa0de36a40f4 ("RDMA/mlx5: Fix integer overflow while resizing CQ")
> > > > 
> > > > is missing a Signed-off-by from its author.
> > > 
> > > Thanks Stephen,
> > > 
> > > May I suggest to the checkpatch maintainers that checkpack should look
> > > for this too?
> > 
> > No such commit in current -hext
> > $ git status HEAD
> > HEAD detached at next-20180308
> 
> https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/rdma/rdma.git/commit/?h=for-rc&id=aa0de36a40f446f5a21a7c1e677b98206e242edb
> 
> > checkpatch doesn't try to match email sender to sign-off
> > as the email sender doesn't have to sign-off on a patch.
> > 
> > It currently does:
> > 
> > 	if ($is_patch && $has_commit_log && $chk_signoff && $signoff == 0) {
> > 		ERROR("MISSING_SIGN_OFF",
> > 		      "Missing Signed-off-by: line(s)\n");
> > 	}
> 
> If I were to suggest an exact check it would be that the commit git
> author and commit git commiter both have signed-off-by lines,

The git commit committer can't be known by checkpatch.

It just looks at patches.

The original author of any patch can't be known either.

There is a mechanism to add a "From:" line that is
supposed to represent the sender of the patch, but that
person may not be the original author.