Re: [PATCH] MAINTAINERS: Clarify check-in requirements for mixed-author patches

[George Dunlap <george.dunlap@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Thu, Dec 8, 2022 at 11:34 AM Jan Beulich <jbeulich@xxxxxxxx> wrote:

On 08.12.2022 11:49, George Dunlap wrote:
> From: George Dunlap <george.dunlap@xxxxxxxxxx>
>
> There was a question raised recently about the requriements for
> checking in a patch which was originally written by one maintainer,
> then picked up and modified by a second maintainer, and which they now both
> agree should be checked in.
>
> It was proposed that in that case, the following set of tags would suffice:
>
>    Signed-off-by: First Author <...>
>    Signed-off-by: Second Author <...>
>    Reviewed-by: First Author <...>
>
> The rationale was as follows:
>
> 1. The patch will be a mix of code, whose copyright is owned by the
> various authors (or the companies they work for).  It's important to
> keep this information around in the event, for instance, of a license
> change or something else requiring knowledge of the copyright owner.
>
> 2. The Signed-off-by of the Second Author approves not only their own
> code, but First Author's code;

The wording in ./MAINTAINERS looks good to me, so it may be benign that
here a perhaps relevant (in the course of development) aspect is not
expressed correctly: Second Author may have fixed a bug in the original
patch, which surely he then doesn't approve. So I'd be inclined to
suggest making this "..., but also the unchanged parts of First Author's
code".

Given the wording in #1, "The patch will be a mix of code...",   I think the context should be clear, that we're talking about the code *in the patch that's being submitted*, not some other code in some other patch that's been submitted previously.

Since the actual change to the policy looks good to me:
Acked-by: Jan Beulich <jbeulich@xxxxxxxx>

Thanks,

 -George