On Thu, 2020-12-03 at 00:43 +0100, Vlastimil Babka wrote: > Hi, > > there was a bit of debate on Twitter about this, so I thought I would > bring it here. Imagine a scenario where patch sits as a commit in > -next and there's a bug report or fix, possibly by a bot or with some > static analysis. The maintainer decides to fold it into the original > patch, which makes sense for e.g. bisectability. But there seem to be > no clear rules about attribution in this case, which looks like there > should be, probably in > Documentation/maintainer/modifying-patches.rst > > The original bug fix might include a From: $author, a Reported-by: > (e.g. syzbot), Fixes: $next-commit, some tag such as Addresses- > Coverity: to credit the static analysis tool, and an SoB. After > folding, all that's left might be a line as "include fix from > $author" in the SoB area. This is a loss of metadata/attribution just > due to folding, and might make contributors unhappy. Had they sent > the fix after the original commit was mainline and immutable, all > the info above would "survive" in the form of new commit.
It has been the case since forever that discussion which improves an uncommitted patch is only captured in email (which now may be preserved in a link tag). Patch updates that come in after the patch is committed get their own commit. We've tried to move people away from counting commits as an indicator of upstream eminence, but it's still a fact of life that this is what matters to a lot of open source community managers. The tension we have is between liking a clean commit in the tree as opposed to a sequence of commits tracking the evolution of the patch and this community manager desire to track patches. So there are two embedded questions here: firstly, should we be as wedded to clean history as we are, because showing the evolution would simply solve this? Secondly, if we are agreed on clean history, how can we make engagement via email as important as engagement via commit for the community managers so the Link tag is enough? I've got to say I think trying to add tags to recognize patch evolution is a mistake and we instead investigate one of the two proposals above. James
