[PATCH] Documentation: SubmittingPatches: Add note about Reviewed-by tags

From: Florian Fainelli
Date: Thu Feb 11 2016 - 21:14:44 EST


As is now common in a lot of organization having an internal code review
process (be it through Gerritt or other tools), patches extracted from
this review process and submitted to public mailing-lists will have
pre-existing Reviewed-by tags. Add a note about why these tags exists,
and what a maintainer could be doing with those. Some maintainers did
complain before that these tags had to be added when the patches get
submitted to the public, while some just ignored and took the patches
as-is.

Signed-off-by: Florian Fainelli <f.fainelli@xxxxxxxxx>
---
Documentation/SubmittingPatches | 8 ++++++++
1 file changed, 8 insertions(+)

diff --git a/Documentation/SubmittingPatches b/Documentation/SubmittingPatches
index d603fa078235..b1b8e39bc5ee 100644
--- a/Documentation/SubmittingPatches
+++ b/Documentation/SubmittingPatches
@@ -582,6 +582,14 @@ reviewers and to inform maintainers of the degree of review which has been
done on the patch. Reviewed-by: tags, when supplied by reviewers known to
understand the subject area and to perform thorough reviews, will normally
increase the likelihood of your patch getting into the kernel.
+The presence of Reviewed-by tags for an initial patch submission are indicative
+of an existing internal review process that may occur at various organizations,
+prior to a mainline kernel submission. The presence of these tags can give the
+maintainer a good appreciation that somebody has done an internal review
+following the same guidelines as those done on a public mailing-list.
+Maintainers are encouraged to maintain these tags while accepting and merging
+patches, appreciation of these pre-existing Revivewed-by tags is left are their
+own discretion.

A Suggested-by: tag indicates that the patch idea is suggested by the person
named and ensures credit to the person for the idea. Please note that this
--
2.1.0