[mpich-devel] [mpich-discuss] Use of Signed-off-by in MPICH

[Michael Blocksome]

In our workflow, often the commit is pushed to an ibm review branch, then 
the signer (usually me) does a signed-off cherry-pick to an anl review 
branch and pushes the code to mpich-ibm git repository for ANL to 
integrate. Using "signed off by" is usually much easier than playing git 
games to ensure that the author and committer are different.

However, it really doesn't matter to IBM. We would prefer to follow a 
documented process that is used by ANL mpich team, but as of now I am not 
aware of any such documentation. The goal from our perspective is to 
ensure that an internal code review has been done before passing the code 
of to ANL - and it would be nice to know who at ANL reviewed the code 
before it was pushed to master. 

Michael Blocksome
Parallel Environment MPI Middleware Team Lead, TCEM
POWER, x86, and Blue Gene HPC Messaging
blocksom at us.ibm.com




From:   Jed Brown <jedbrown at mcs.anl.gov>
To:     Michael Blocksome/Rochester/IBM at IBMUS, 
Cc:     devel at mpich.org
Date:   01/06/2014 01:21 PM
Subject:        Re: [mpich-discuss] Use of Signed-off-by in MPICH



Michael Blocksome <blocksom at us.ibm.com> writes:

> IBM uses the "signed off by" feature to enforce/track code reviews 
before 
> any code gets contributed to ANL. The intent is that the commit author 
!= 
> the commit signer when the code goes out. Often a developer at ANL will 
> also review the code before it gets integrated into the master branch 
(IBM 
> developers don't have push authority) and sign the commit again.

So the last stage (whoever makes the actual commit) is already available
because Git has separate fields for Committer and Author, as shown by
"git log --format=fuller".

> We use the text "Signed-off-by:xxxx <yyy at zzz>" simply because this is 
what 
> is supported by the git tools. You can use commands like `git 
cherry-pick 
> -s`, `git commit --amend -s`, and `git am -s` to ease the signing 
effort. 

Yes, though this only adds your own name.  Do you email patches around
until then?  When I started this thread, I pointed out a recent case
where the author and committer were the same, but someone else was
providing a Signed-off-by.  Either the commit went back and forth or
(more likely) the committer amended the commit to add a Signed-off-by
>From the reviewer.  The idea with Git's -s is that you only ever sign
for yourself, though if you integrate out-of-band content, you may copy
the Signed-off-by tag provided by that other person.  So the design of
the -s option is not a perfect match, but I can see that it's often
convenient.  In contrast, Reviewed-by, Acked-by, and similar are almost
always a result of the author or committer translating out-of-band
information (e.g., an email discussion).

If you want to automatically add Reviewed-by tags, you could use
.git/hooks/prepare-commit-msg, for example.

Of course you can keep using Signed-off-by in place of Reviewed-by,
though it causes some confusion for people new to the project,
attempting to track provenance when either extracting code or using
submodules with other projects that use the usual conventions, or
scripts providing repository analytics.

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