The docs for submitting a patch describe using your "Real Name" with
the Signed-off-by line. Although somewhat ambiguous, this has often
been interpreted to mean someone's legal name.
In recent times, there's been a general push back[1] against the notion
that use of Signed-off-by in a project automatically requires / implies
the use of legal ("real") names and greater awareness of the downsides.
Full discussion of the problems of such policies is beyond the scope of
this commit message, but at a high level they are liable to marginalize,
disadvantage, and potentially result in harm, to contributors.
TL;DR: there are compelling reasons for a person to choose distinct
identities in different contexts & a decision to override that choice
should not be taken lightly.
A number of key projects have responded to the issues raised by making
it clear that a contributor is free to determine the identity used in
SoB lines:
* Linux has clarified[2] that they merely expect use of the
contributor's "known identity", removing the previous explicit
rejection of pseudonyms.
* CNCF has clarified[3] that the real name is simply the identity
the contributor chooses to use in the context of the community
and does not have to be a legal name, nor birth name, nor appear
on any government ID.
Since we have no intention of ever routinely checking any form of ID
documents for contributors[4], realistically we have no way of knowing
anything about the name they are using, except through chance, or
through the contributor volunteering the information. IOW, we almost
certainly already have people using pseudonyms for contributions.
This proposes to accept that reality and eliminate unnecessary friction,
by following Linux & the CNCF in merely asking that a contributors'
commonly known identity, of their choosing, be used with the SoB line.
[1] Raised in many contexts at many times, but a decent overall summary
can be read at https://drewdevault.com/2023/10/31/On-real-names.html
[2] https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/commit/?id=d4563201f33a022fc0353033d9dfeb1606a88330
[3] https://github.com/cncf/foundation/blob/659fd32c86dc/dco-guidelines.md
[4] Excluding the rare GPG key signing parties for regular maintainers
Signed-off-by: Daniel P. Berrangé <berrange@redhat.com>
Acked-by: Stefan Hajnoczi <stefanha@redhat.com>
Acked-by: Peter Maydell <peter.maydell@linaro.org>
Reviewed-by: Philippe Mathieu-Daudé <philmd@linaro.org>
Reviewed-by: Alex Bennée <alex.bennee@linaro.org>
Acked-by: Richard Henderson <richard.henderson@linaro.org>
Message-Id: <20241021190939.1482466-1-berrange@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Alex Bennée <alex.bennee@linaro.org>
Message-Id: <20241121165806.476008-40-alex.bennee@linaro.org>
There where some broken links so fix those up with proper references
to the devel docs. I also did a little light copy-editing to reflect
the current state and broke up a paragraph to reduce the "wall of
text" effect.
Signed-off-by: Alex Bennée <alex.bennee@linaro.org>
Reviewed-by: Daniel P. Berrangé <berrange@redhat.com>
Message-Id: <20220527153603.887929-34-alex.bennee@linaro.org>
I completely botched up the merged[0] rST conversion of this document by
accidentally dropping entire hunks (!) of text. :-( I made it very hard
for reviewers to spot it, as the omitted text was buried deep in the
document. To fix my hatchet job, I reconverted the "SubmitAPatch"
wiki[1] page from scratch and replaced the existing rST with it, while
making sure I incorporated previous feedback.
In summary, in this reconverted edition:
- I did a careful (to the extent my eyes allowed) para-by-para
comparison of the wiki and the rST to make sure I didn't omit
anything accidentally.
- I made sure to work in the cosmetic feedback[2] that Thomas Huth
pointed out in the merged (and botched) edition:
- fix the hyperlinks in "Split up long patches"
- replace ".". with "does not end with a dot" (in "Write a meaningful
commit message" section)
- replace "---" with ``---`` so that it doesn't render as an em-dash
(there were two other occurrences; I fixed those too)
- Use "QEMU" spelling consistently in prose usage
- Add a consistent "refer to git-config" link where appropriate
Thanks to Thomas Huth and Alex Bennée for noticing it on IRC. And sorry
for my sloppiness.
Fixes: 9f73de8df0 ("docs: rSTify the "SubmitAPatch" wiki")
[0] https://gitlab.com/qemu-project/qemu/-/commit/9f73de8df033
[1] https://wiki.qemu.org/index.php?title=Contribute/SubmitAPatch&oldid=10387
[2] https://lists.nongnu.org/archive/html/qemu-devel/2021-11/msg03600.html
Signed-off-by: Kashyap Chamarthy <kchamart@redhat.com>
Message-Id: <20211119193118.949698-2-kchamart@redhat.com>
Reviewed-by: Eric Blake <eblake@redhat.com>
[thuth: Some more cosmetical changes, fixed links from external to internal]
Signed-off-by: Thomas Huth <thuth@redhat.com>
