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Who wrote - and approved - 2.6.22

Who wrote - and approved - 2.6.22

Posted Jun 14, 2007 20:48 UTC (Thu) by elanthis (guest, #6227)
Parent article: Who wrote - and approved - 2.6.22

Silly question, but how do 20% of patches get into mainline without passing through Linux (or even Andrew) ?

Is it just that Linus doesn't sign-off when he merges patches, so the sign-offs from him are those he reviewed personally versus those reviewed by some other "trusted lieutenant" not on that top 20 list?


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Who wrote - and approved - 2.6.22

Posted Jun 15, 2007 0:23 UTC (Fri) by aegl (subscriber, #37581) [Link]

Yes. When Linus does a "pull" from a subsystem maintainer's tree, none of the changesets get his sign-off.

Who wrote - and approved - 2.6.22

Posted Jun 15, 2007 16:25 UTC (Fri) by aegl (subscriber, #37581) [Link]

It isn't a sure bet that a change-set with a sign-off from Linus has actually been reviewed by him either ... when Andrew Morton sends a "patch-bomb" with several hundred e-mail messages moving code from -mm to Linus, chances are that Linus does not sit down and read each and every one of them. But they will all get a "Signed-off-by" from Linus because the GIT tool that applies patches from a mailbox adds a sign-off to each commit that is applied that way.

If Andrew started using a GIT tree to transfer to Linus, then many of those "Signed-off-by: Linus" commits would just end the trail-of-blame with Andrew's sign-off.

This is sort of documented in Documentation/SubmittingPatches: "The Signed-off-by: tag indicates that the signer was involved in the development of the patch, or that he/she was in the patch's delivery path.". "In the patches delivery path" does not necessarily mean "Reviewed by".

So some care is needed when interpreting this data since some quite large parts are affected by the mechanisms used to move changes around.

Who wrote - and approved - 2.6.22

Posted Jun 16, 2007 13:05 UTC (Sat) by hingo (guest, #14792) [Link]

Surely Andrew Morton uses GIT to transfer code to Linus?

If the opposite was true, then we would have just uncovered a major scoop, that Linus doesn't really do anything at all anymore, just sits around taking credit for not coding anything, not approving anything.

Who wrote - and approved - 2.6.22

Posted Jun 16, 2007 18:02 UTC (Sat) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]

the facts are in between these two.

as I understand it, Andrew doesn't normally use git to send patches to Linus, but at the same time signed off by indicates that the person is vouching for the patch. I don't think that it's done automaticaly by the git scripts (remember, they are used by projects that don't do 'signed off by' lines)

Linus has said many times that his job is more to be a gatekeeper then a coder nowdays, but he still writes and modifies code.

David Lang

Who wrote - and approved - 2.6.22

Posted Jun 17, 2007 9:25 UTC (Sun) by hingo (guest, #14792) [Link]

Ok. What I was really wondering was that Andrew Signs off 0.8% more patches than Linus, so mathematically it's impossible to claim that some script by Linux automatically signs off everything Andrew has signed?

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