Re: [Ksummit-discuss] crediting bug reports and fixes folded into original patch

From: Leon Romanovsky <leon@kernel.org>
To: Dan Williams <dan.j.williams@intel.com>
Cc: "ksummit-discuss@lists.linuxfoundation.org"
	<ksummit-discuss@lists.linuxfoundation.org>,
	LKML <linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org>,
	Vlastimil Babka <vbabka@suse.cz>
Subject: Re: [Ksummit-discuss] crediting bug reports and fixes folded into original patch
Date: Thu, 3 Dec 2020 11:34:58 +0200	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <20201203093458.GA16543@unreal> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <CAPcyv4jDHMt4PpR2Htvw27rn5i5sCkwXtoZH-rFbtG8Hj7x1sg@mail.gmail.com>

On Wed, Dec 02, 2020 at 08:02:27PM -0800, Dan Williams wrote:
> On Wed, Dec 2, 2020 at 3:44 PM Vlastimil Babka <vbabka@suse.cz> 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.
> >
> > So I think we could decide what the proper format would be, and document it
> > properly. I personally wouldn't mind just copy/pasting the whole commit message
> > of the fix (with just a short issue description, no need to include stacktraces
> > etc if the fix is folded), we could just standardize where, and how to delimit
> > it from the main commit message. If it's a report (person or bot) of a bug that
> > the main author then fixed, preserve the Reported-by in the same way (making
> > clear it's not a Reported-By for the "main thing" addressed by the commit).
> >
> > In the debate one less verbose alternatve proposed was a SoB with comment
> > describing it's for a fix and not whole patch, as some see SoB as the main mark
> > of contribution, that can be easily found and counted etc. I'm not so sure about
> > it myself, as AFAIK SoB is mainly a DCO thing, and for a maintainer it means
> > something else ("passed through my tree") than for a patch author. And this
> > approach would still lose the other tags.
> >
> > Thoughts?
>
> How about a convention to add a Reported-by: and a Link: to the
> incremental fixup discussion? It's just polite to credit helpful
> feedback, not sure it needs a more formal process.

Maybe "Fixup-Reported-by:" and "Fixup-Link:"?

Thanks
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