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[Soren Hansen <soren@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

2011/4/22 FUJITA Tomonori <fujita.tomonori@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>:
>> I find the rebasing/cherry-picking practice even worse in the Linux
>> kernel context due to the patch tagging used there. If I add a
>> "Signed-off-by: Soren Hansen" to a patch and someone cherry picks that
>> patch or moves it around as part of a rebase, my patch still shows up as
>> "Signed-off-by: me" even though I've never signed off on the patch in
>> its new context. I remember at one point I had a patch that added some
> "Signed-off-by:" is not about the context. For Linux kernel, it simply
> says that you release your code under GPL.

Fair enough. That doesn't change that my name is still on the commit,
and there might be a bunch of Acked-By's or Tested-By's on there that
suddenly are invalid, because those people never tested the patch in the
context where it's now found.

> You can't control how other people use it.

Of course I can't. I'm objecting to the fact that certain conventions
among users of certain tools encourage moving patches (not code, but
patches to code. Very different things.) around and leaving artefacts in
the metadata that claims that a whole bunch of people have reviewed it
and acknowledge that it works as intended.

> That's the fundamental rule under the majority of OSS licenses. With
> any tools, you can't the rule. Your code could cause problems in a
> different context (you didn't expect), but it's not the responsibility
> of your code.

Of course it's not my responsiblity if people take a patch I make and
apply it in a different place. The problem is that the tools leave *no*
way to tell if the change has been cherry-picked and taken out of its
natural context or if it's in the exact place where I wrote it and
tested it. It's the revision control systems' responsibility to make
this obvious, and once you accept the concept of rebasing, you're
instructing your revision control system to lie.

> I vote for git. It's much eaiser to try to get your changes merged
> into a project that uses git.

Can you substantiate that somehow? How is it easier?

-- 
Soren Hansen        | http://linux2go.dk/
Ubuntu Developer    | http://www.ubuntu.com/
OpenStack Developer | http://www.openstack.org/