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From:   Lukas Bulwahn <lukas.bulwahn@gmail.com>
Date:   Tue, 1 Dec 2020 19:21:39 +0100
Message-ID: <CAKXUXMx8RURmeyzp5Ak7_409oaVJo622ndpC5VceN-C_f-HPdg@mail.gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [PATCH v5] checkpatch: add fix and improve warning msg for
 Non-standard signature
To:     Joe Perches <joe@perches.com>
Cc:     Aditya Srivastava <yashsri421@gmail.com>,
        Linux Kernel Mailing List <linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org>,
        linux-kernel-mentees@lists.linuxfoundation.org
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On Tue, Dec 1, 2020 at 6:24 PM Joe Perches <joe@perches.com> wrote:
>
> On Tue, 2020-12-01 at 16:59 +0530, Aditya Srivastava wrote:
> > Currently, checkpatch.pl warns for BAD_SIGN_OFF on non-standard signature
> > styles.
> >
> > This warning occurs because of incorrect use of signature tags,
> > e.g. an evaluation on v4.13..v5.8 showed the use of following incorrect
> > signature tags, which may seem correct, but are not standard:
>
> I'm not a fan of this patch.
>
> There is already a "non-standard" signature warning for
> all of these cases since 2012, predating the range of this
> retrospective evaluation by over 5 years and yet these
> existing commits have been accepted.
>
> The value in actual standardization and effectively
> requiring specific signature style tags is quite low.
>
> Anyone that signed a thing a particular way should be free
> to sign the thing as they choose.
>
> Most of these warnings would also still be in the tree in
> the future in new patches as running checkpatch without
> it emitting a message of any type isn't a requirement nor
> should checkpatch use actually be required workflow.
>

Can we scale this fixing feature down to the very obvious synonyms
that simply do not add anything but confusion?

Such as for those four here:

Co-authored-by (count: 43) => Co-developed-by
Reviewed-off-by (count: 5) => Reviewed-by
Proposed-by (count: 5) => Suggested-by
Suggestions-by (count: 3) => Suggested-by

Then, we can probably also drop the rationale because it is pretty clear.

Of course, the impact might be really zero, given that it is unclear
if those authors did actually ever run checkpatch in the first place.

Joe, if you see no value in even such a minimal fix feature, let us
drop that idea and move on. There are enough other things to work on.

Lukas