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- .. _modifyingpatches:
- Modifying Patches
- =================
- If you are a subsystem or branch maintainer, sometimes you need to slightly
- modify patches you receive in order to merge them, because the code is not
- exactly the same in your tree and the submitters'. If you stick strictly to
- rule (c) of the developers certificate of origin, you should ask the submitter
- to rediff, but this is a totally counter-productive waste of time and energy.
- Rule (b) allows you to adjust the code, but then it is very impolite to change
- one submitters code and make him endorse your bugs. To solve this problem, it
- is recommended that you add a line between the last Signed-off-by header and
- yours, indicating the nature of your changes. While there is nothing mandatory
- about this, it seems like prepending the description with your mail and/or
- name, all enclosed in square brackets, is noticeable enough to make it obvious
- that you are responsible for last-minute changes. Example::
- Signed-off-by: Random J Developer <[email protected]>
- [[email protected]: struct foo moved from foo.c to foo.h]
- Signed-off-by: Lucky K Maintainer <[email protected]>
- This practice is particularly helpful if you maintain a stable branch and
- want at the same time to credit the author, track changes, merge the fix,
- and protect the submitter from complaints. Note that under no circumstances
- can you change the author's identity (the From header), as it is the one
- which appears in the changelog.
- Special note to back-porters: It seems to be a common and useful practice
- to insert an indication of the origin of a patch at the top of the commit
- message (just after the subject line) to facilitate tracking. For instance,
- here's what we see in a 3.x-stable release::
- Date: Tue Oct 7 07:26:38 2014 -0400
- libata: Un-break ATA blacklist
- commit 1c40279960bcd7d52dbdf1d466b20d24b99176c8 upstream.
- And here's what might appear in an older kernel once a patch is backported::
- Date: Tue May 13 22:12:27 2008 +0200
- wireless, airo: waitbusy() won't delay
- [backport of 2.6 commit b7acbdfbd1f277c1eb23f344f899cfa4cd0bf36a]
- Whatever the format, this information provides a valuable help to people
- tracking your trees, and to people trying to troubleshoot bugs in your
- tree.
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