On Wednesday 25 January 2017 08:28 PM, Thomas Monjalon wrote:
2017-01-25 13:53, Van Haaren, Harry:
There was an idea (from Thomas) to better document the Acked-by and Reviewed-By
in the above thread, which I think is worth doing to make the process clearer.
I'll kick off a thread*, and offer to submit a patch for the documentation when
a consensus is reached.
The question that needs to be addressed is "What is the most powerful signoff to add
as somebody who checked a patch?"
I do not see the benefit of knowing the most powerful.
Anyway, the most powerful tags are done by trusted people.
And people are trusted after delivering good reviews or patches ;)
The question should be "How to use the tags?"
The documentation mentions Acked, Reviewed, and Tested by[1], as signoffs that
can be commented on patches. The Review Process[2] section mentions Reviewed
and Tested by, but nowhere specifically states what any of these indicate.
Offered below is my current understanding of the Acked-by; Reviewed-by; and
Tested-by tags, in order of least-powerful first:
3) Tested-by: (least powerful)
- Indicates having passed testing of functionality, and works as expected for
Tester
- Does NOT include full code review (instead use Reviewed by)
- Does NOT indicate that the Tester understands architecture (instead use
Acked by)
2) Reviewed-by:
- Indicates having passed code-review, checkpatch and compilation testing by
Reviewer
Compilation testing is done by the CI.
The reviewer must just check the results.
- Does NOT include full testing of functionality (instead use Tested-by)
- Does NOT indicate that the Reviewer understands architecture (instead use
Acked by)
I disagree here.
The reviewer must understand the impacts of the patch.
That's why a Reviewed-by tag is really strong.
From what I understand, 'Reviewed-by' and 'Acked-by' are the other way
around.
- Acked-by is intent that 'I agree with change'.
- Reviewed-by is 'I vouch for the changes' either through review or
testing or both.
1) Acked-by: (most powerful)
- Indicates Reviewed-by, but also:
A maintainer may want to approve the intent without doing a full review,
especially if he trusts the author or the reviewers.
That's why I think Acked-by should not include Reviewed-by.
If a maintainer does a full review, he should use Reviewed-by instead of
Acked-by.
- Acker understands impact to architecture (if any) and agrees with changes
- Acker has performed runtime sanity check
Not sure about this one.
Personnaly I give some Acks without testing sometimes.
We may add a Tested-by to indicate we made some tests.
- Requests "please merge" to maintainer
Yes, "please merge" to tree maintainer (committer).
- Level of trust in Acked-by based on previous contributions to
DPDK/networking community
The level of trust applies to any tag or comment.
The above is a suggested interpretation, alternative interpretations welcomed.
Thanks Harry
