About GIT and committing submissions

From: Felix Palmen <felix_at_palmen-it.de>
Date: Sat, 16 Oct 2021 11:29:34 UTC
Hi all,

since the transition to GIT, there's a way to have author information of
a commit in the VCS' own metadata, so the commit message metadata field
'Submitted by:' shouldn't be used any more. But in practice, I see a
nice mixture of

* Using GIT's --author info
* Using 'Submitted by:'
* Even using 'Reported by:' in combination with 'PR:'

In order to make this more consistent, I'd suggest a few additional
guidelines:

* For contributors:

- As the preferred format for submissions, use 'git format-patch'. Of
  course, a plain patch is still ok, and for complex submissions, taking
  them to phab is still preferred.
- If you want to submit a series of commits that isn't complex enough
  for phab, just concatenate the files created by 'git format-patch'.

* For committers:

- If the submission is in 'git format-patch' format, use 'git am' to
  apply it and, if necessary, edit the commit message(s) with 'git
  commit --amend'.
- Otherwise, use the '--author' flag to 'git commit' when committing the
  change.

BTW, shouldn't submissions in shar format be removed from the porter's
handbook entirely? I personally think they're cumbersome for both the
contributor and the committer.

So, what do you think?

BR, Felix

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