Re: [gentoo-portage-dev] Signing off patches

[Tom Wijsman]

On Sat, 18 Jan 2014 08:43:12 -0800
"W. Trevor King" <wking@×××××××.us> wrote:

> On Sat, Jan 18, 2014 at 04:02:02PM +0100, Tom Wijsman wrote:
> I think the idea is that you shouldn't need to refer to an external
> resource like the mailing list to understand the idea behind the
> patch,

Either someone cares about the background of a patch or he/she doesn't.

"The idea" is not documented by these annotations, hence if one wants to
know the reasoning behind the certain way it is implemented he/she will
have to go to the mailing list to know that. That is if the existing
comments / commit message were insufficient for what one wonders about.

> or the amount of review it received.

The amount of review is a statistic; as there is no requirement for a
minimal amount of review(er)s, knowing that amount brings us no gain.

> The body of the commit message should summarize the consensus reached
> on the mailing list,

That message is written as part of the patch that is reviewed; it
rarely gets updated with the consensus, unless we suggest / require
people to do that. However, similar to vapier's response, I'd think
introducing such processes feel like unnecessary efforts.

> and these tags are basically standardized thank-you notes crediting
> non-authors who were involved in that process.  They don't have to go
> on every patch, but if you want to mention somebody:
>
>   Reviewed-by: Random J Developer <random@×××××××××××××××××.org>
>   Reviewed-by: Other R Developer <other@×××××××××××××××××.org>
>
> at the end of the commit message is easier to write and read than:
>
>   This patch was reviewed Random J Developer
>   <random@×××××××××××××××××.org> and Other R Developer
>   <other@×××××××××××××××××.org>.

Exactly: Do we want to spend time on this or not? Do we add everyone
involved? Or do we just add people whom are not on the Portage team?

People in the team can be expected to be respectful and thankful, thus
I prefer the latter effort (non-Portage team only) if possible. 

Unless we intend to introduce this for statistics, although I think
that prior annotation history missing as well as people that will
casually forgot to add these annotations will make the statistics a
misrepresentation. At least as long as humans instead of a system add
these annotations, it be more nice to have a review system that adds
these for us; but well, that would be over-engineering for Portage...

-- 
With kind regards,

Tom Wijsman (TomWij)
Gentoo Developer

E-mail address  : TomWij@g.o
GPG Public Key  : 6D34E57D
GPG Fingerprint : C165 AF18 AB4C 400B C3D2  ABF0 95B2 1FCD 6D34 E57D