Re: [PATCH v4] watchdog: Add Broadcom BCM2835 watchdog timer driver

[Stephen Warren]

On 06/18/2013 10:50 AM, Lubomir Rintel wrote:
> Hi Wim,
> 
> On Sun, 2013-05-26 at 16:22 +0200, Wim Van Sebroeck wrote:
>> Hi Lubomir,
>>
>>> On 03/27/2013 10:40 AM, Lubomir Rintel wrote:
>>>> This adds a driver for watchdog timer hardware present on Broadcom BCM2835 SoC,
>>>> used in Raspberry Pi and Roku 2 devices.
>>>>
>>>> Signed-off-by: Lubomir Rintel <lkundrak@xxxxx>
>>>> Signed-off-by: Dom Cobley <popcornmix@xxxxxxxxx>
>>>
>>> Those two s-o-b lines should be swapped, since if Dom did sign off on
>>> any part of this patch, he did it before you did.
>>>
>>> That said...
>>>
>>> I wonder if it's actually appropriate to include Dom's s-o-b here, since
>>> I don't think he really wrote this patch itself. I think you mentioned
>>> that you hadn't use much of the downstream driver except for some defines?
>>>
>>> To be clear, I mentioned the existence of the S-o-b line downstream
>>> simply to demonstrate that the commits you were getting information from
>>> had correctly followed the process described in
>>> Documentation/SubmittingPatches, and so it was OK to use that
>>> information while creating a GPL'd driver.
>>>
>>> So there are a couple of ways that this patch could have been created:
>>>
>>> 1) You took the downstream commit itself, cherry-picked it into the
>>> upstream kernel, modified it to suit upstream, and then submitted that.
>>> The modifications might be extensive, such as renaming the file,
>>> removing parts of the code that the upstream watchdog core now handles,
>>> adding some new features, fixing bugs, cleanup, etc.; whatever is needed
>>> to upstream the patch.
>>>
>>> In this case, I believe it would be appropriate to maintain any S-o-b
>>> lines from the original downstream commit, and add yours. But, I believe
>>> you should also (a) maintain the git author field from the original
>>> downstream commit (b) include a list of the changes you made to the
>>> patch in the commit description, so you can be blamed for them rather
>>> than the original author:-)
>>>
>>> 2) You read the downstream commit for information, but created a
>>> completely new driver for the upstream kernel, using the downstream
>>> driver just as a reference. In this case, I believe it's fine for the
>>> git author field to be you, and for the only s-o-b line present to be
>>> yours, since you really did write the patch from scratch. However, you
>>> should credit the downstream work in the (c) header and/or commit
>>> description.
>>>
>>> This current patch sees to be a slight hybrid of both approaches (you're
>>> listed as the git author, but have included Dom's s-o-b line on a patch
>>> I don't think he created, and wasn't directly derived from one he created).
>>>
>>> I'm not sure if I'm being too picky. I guess I'll leave it up to Wim Van
>>> Sebroeck, since he's the watchdog maintainer and would be the person who
>>> applies this patch.
>>
>> Can you create a patch v5 with yourselve as author and add the necessary (c)
>> and references in it so that I can do the final review? (That is if situation
>> 2 is indeed the case. If however it is situation 1 then we should get the
>> original code and have that as a patch and then add a second patch with your
>> modifications.).
> 
> I'm still not sure what to do. For most part, the driver is written from
> scratch, since the original one was not utilizing recent enough
> frameworks (such as watchdog-core or device tree bindings). Thus the
> patch against the original driver would not make any sense at all.
> 
> On the other hand, I've referred to the original driver for hardware
> information and copied a couple of defines as they are (such as
> SECS_TO_WDOG_TICKS), thus I figured out it's a required to include the
> original driver's sign-off and copyright information.
> 
> Thus neither 1) nor 2) is the case, and I can't figure out myself what
> needs to be changed at this point. I'm wondering if you could help me
> decide?

This sounds exactly like case (2) to me; copying a few defines for HW
constants doesn't really sound like having derived the driver from the
original commit.
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