Defining the Reviewed-by Tag

Jeremy — Tue, 09 Oct 2007 03:07:22 +0000

"Last month, at the kernel summit, there was discussion of putting a Reviewed-by: tag onto patches to document the oversight they had received on their way into the mainline," began Jonathan Corbet in an effort to define the meaning of the recently introduced reviewed-by tag. He continued, "that tag has made an occasional appearance since then, but there has not yet been a discussion of what it really means. So it has not yet brought a whole lot of value to the process."

In the continued discussion, it was requested that all commit tags be defined, prompting Jonathan to update his documentation to include Signed-off-by, Acked-by, Cc, and Tested-by along with his documentation for Reviewed-by. He offered the following definition for the new Reviewed-by tag:

"The patch has been reviewed and found acceptible according to the Reviewer's Statement as found at the bottom of this file. A Reviewed-by tag is a statement of opinion that the patch is an appropriate modification of the kernel without any remaining serious technical issues. Any interested reviewer (who has done the work) can offer a Reviewed-by tag for a patch."

Linux: Using Acked-by Tags

Jeremy — Thu, 07 Jun 2007 17:56:07 +0000

Andrew Morton submitted some documentation explaining the use of the "Signed-off-by" and "Acked-by" tags added when patches are submitted for conclusion into the Linux kernel. "The Signed-off-by: tag implies that the signer was involved in the development of the patch, or that he/she was in the patch's delivery path," the documentation explains, "if a person was not directly involved in the preparation or handling of a patch but wishes to signify and record their approval of it then they can arrange to have an Acked-by: line added to the patch's changelog." When asked about the possibility of including "Tested-by" tags, Andrew replied, "I think it's very useful information to have. For a start, it tells you who has the hardware and knows how to build a kernel. So if you're making a change to a driver and want it tested, you can troll the file's changelog looking for people who might be able to help."

The thread went on to discuss if Ack and Nack patches were useful from non-maintainers. Andrew suggested that a without additional information they don't offer much, "it's better to just provide constructive, detailed technical comments and from that it becomes pretty obvious to all parties whether or not the patch has a future. If you did properly provide that useful feedback then the 'ack' or 'nack' bit becomes redundant." He went on to stress the need for useful feedback, "frankly, I don't trust a simple 'ack' much at all. It's the kernel equivalent of 'whoa, kewl!'"

KernelTrap - signed-off-by

Defining the Reviewed-by Tag

Linux: Using Acked-by Tags