Use of Signed-off-by in gnulib

[Simon Josefsson]

All,

I cannot find any documentation on what Signed-off-by means for a commit
in gnulib, but we do use it more than rarely (see below).  Is there some
existing URL we can use to document what we want it to mean, or should
we add something to the manual?  What do we want it to mean?

FWIW, I've usually used it as a way to signal that I reviewed and
committed some patch authored by someone else, and that I "approve" of
it.  I think the traditional meaning is that a commit complies with
rules including licensing, which doesn't really make sense for GNU
projects that have other policies that govern that.

If we cannot explain what we want Signed-off-by: to mean, maybe we
should avoid using them at all?  And enforcing that using some commit
hook, if feasible.

/Simon

jas@kaka:~/src/gnulib$ git log|grep ^commit|wc -l
25798
jas@kaka:~/src/gnulib$ git log|grep 'Signed-off-by: '|wc -l
1217
jas@kaka:~/src/gnulib$ git log|grep Signed-off-by|sort|uniq -c
      1     Signed-off-by: Alex Nelson <ajnelson@cs.ucsc.edu>
      2     Signed-off-by: Andreas Gruenbacher <agruen@suse.de>
      1     Signed-off-by: Andrew Borodin <aborodin@vmail.ru>
      3     Signed-off-by: Bastien Roucariès <rouca@debian.org>
      4     Signed-off-by: Ben Walton <bdwalton@gmail.com>
      6     Signed-off-by: Ben Walton <bwalton@artsci.utoronto.ca>
      1     Signed-off-by: Biswapriyo Nath <nathbappai@gmail.com>
      1     Signed-off-by: Bjarni Ingi Gislason <bjarniig@rhi.hi.is>
      1     Signed-off-by: Dmitry Selyutin <ghostmansd@gmail.com>
      1     Signed-off-by: Egor Ignatov <egori@altlinux.org>
    629     Signed-off-by: Eric Blake <ebb9@byu.net>
    486     Signed-off-by: Eric Blake <eblake@redhat.com>
      1     Signed-off-by: Eric Wong <normalperson@yhbt.net>
      1     Signed-off-by: Erik Skultety <eskultet@redhat.com>
      5     Signed-off-by: Gary V. Vaughan <gary@gnu.org>
      1     Signed-off-by inspired lines in the log message formatted as
      2     Signed-off-by: Jia Zhang <qianyue.zj@alibaba-inc.com>
      5     Signed-off-by: Jim Meyering <meyering@redhat.com>
      1     Signed-off-by: Johannes Schindelin <johannes.schindelin@gmx.de>
      1     Signed-off-by: Martin Kletzander <mkletzan@redhat.com>
      2     Signed-off-by: Mathieu Anquetin <mathieu@anquetin.eu>
      4     Signed-off-by: Matteo Croce <mcroce@redhat.com>
      1     Signed-off-by: Michal Privoznik <mprivozn@redhat.com>
      1     Signed-off-by: Mike Frysinger <vapier@gentoo.org>
      1     Signed-off-by: Natanael Copa <ncopa@alpinelinux.org>
      2     Signed-off-by: Pádraig Brady <P@draigBrady.com>
      1     Signed-off-by: Pavel Hrdina <phrdina@redhat.com>
      2     Signed-off-by: Peter Rosin <peda@lysator.liu.se>
     31     Signed-off-by: Ralf Wildenhues <Ralf.Wildenhues@gmx.de>
      2     Signed-off-by: Roman Bolshakov <r.bolshakov@yadro.com>
     14     Signed-off-by: Simon Josefsson <simon@josefsson.org>
      2     Signed-off-by: Stefano Lattarini <stefano.lattarini@gmail.com>
      1     Signed-off-by: Thien-Thi Nguyen <ttn@gnuvola.org>
      1     Signed-off-by: Thomas Petazzoni 
<thomas.petazzoni@free-electrons.com>
jas@kaka:~/src/gnulib$

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