Hi Geert,

> > 1) we need a better distinction between Acked-by: and Reviewed-by: and encourage
> >    stricter use of that
> 
> Before we had "Reviewed-by", "Acked-by" meant "looks OK to me".
> Then we got "Reviewed-by" for more thorough reviews.

This is what still makes most sense to me. You can express e.g. that you
like a patch series and approve the general approach taken but haven't
gone for the gory details -> Acked-by (a short explaining paragraph
would make sense, then, too)

Is that old fashioned?

Acked-by only for maintainers doesn't make sense to me. Neiher does when
Acked-by has a different meaning for maintainers and non-maintainers.

> > 3) trivial patches should rather get Acked-by
> 
> These days when given by a maintainer, "Acked-by" means that the
> maintainer is happy for the patch going in through another subsystem.

I still see this as a "looks OK to me" variant. A patch is good enough
to enter my subsystem. Sometimes, I also use "Reviewed-by" for this,
namely when I thoroughly looked at (=reviewed) a patch.

> > 2) A short paragraph will usually do. Of course, trust helps a lot, but it
> > doesn't solve everything. Trusted people can be in a hurry, too, etc. And for
> > people I don't know, the plain tag doesn't tell me much. Examples for short
> > descriptions: "I can't say much about the media part, but the I2C part is
> > proper" or "I also checked the documentation and I think this is a good
> > approach to overcome the issue" or "All my concerns in the preceding
> > discussions have been addressed"
> 
> Definitely good to have, but hard to enforce, without making the process
> heavier.

As I wrote before, I don't want to enforce that. But spread the word
that it is good to have and should be done and common sense should apply.

> I have a fifth thesis: many people (incl. guilty me) browse quickly
> through many patches flying by on mailing lists, but don't always go to
> the effort of replying if they don't see something wrong immediately.
> This means we don't catch a share of the reviews happening.

For me, Acked-by would do here.

Thanks,

   Wolfram