Am 13.03.2012 14:27, schrieb Avi Kivity:
On 03/12/2012 08:18 PM, Stefano Stabellini wrote:
* Reviewed-by: Full Name<email>
A Reviewed-by tag is a statement of opinion that the patch is an appropriate
modification without any remaining serious technical issues. Any interested
reviewer (who has done the work) can offer a Reviewed-by tag for a patch.
My understanding until now was that both Acked-by and Reviewed-by were tags
reserved to people with privileges to write into the repository.
Anybody should be allowed to give his own Acked-by or Reviewed-by, not
just maintainers. Of course an acked-by from the maintainer of the area
the patch is touching has a different weight.
To me, an Ack is reserved for people who have authority in an area,
either by being the formal maintainer of the subsystem, or by just being
an expert in that area. An Acked-by short-circuit's the following exchange:
Author: submit patch P
Maintainer: P touches subsystem X, what do Expert E and sub-maintainer
M have to say about it?
E, M: looks okay
The acked-by allows the maintainer to skip the exchange. Of course
usually patches should go through a submaintainer tree, but sometimes
this is not feasible, either because there is no tree for that area, or
because the patch or patchset touches many subsystems.
So an ack should come from people who expect to be asked about the patch.
The way I saw it, Acked-by means that the person asserts that the
contents of the change is sensible, and when I use it I either tested it
myself or am absolutely sure it doesn't break the build.
Reviewed-by I use by comparison to assert that a patch reasonably
conforms to our Coding guidelines, has an SoB and does nothing obviously
stupid but that I did not bother to smoke-test on my system.
What I have wondered is, is there any semantic difference between "Ack",
"Acked", "ACK" and "Acked-by: name<email>"? I.e., when someone replies
with "Ack", should one document that as an Acked-by for a PULL?