Re: [PATCH 2/3] docs: submitting-patches: clarify difference between Acked-by and Reviewed-by

[Theodore Ts'o]

On Sun, Jan 12, 2025 at 11:35:29AM -0500, Neal Gompa wrote:
> I've had my Reviewed-by tags silently ignored or deliberately stripped
> because even though I've done a technical review, the maintainer does
> not believe that I did. Therefore, what I am saying is that
> maintainers seem to speciously decide whether an Acked-by or
> Reviewed-by tag is appropriate or not *after* someone has sent it.
> 
> This is the fundamental problem I have right now. This decision is not
> the maintainer's to make, it is the submitter's.

Nope, it's is *absolutely* the maintainer's to make.  If I don't trust
the reviewer, or reviewer is known to be someone who is only giving
English grammer or policy nit-picking, I am absolutely going to ignore
the reviewer, and in some cases, tell the patch submitter that should
feel to ignore the reviewer or feel that they should be obliged to pay
attention to certain reviewers.

Note also that a submitter is not obliged to resend a patch if someone
sends an Acked-by or Reviewed-by.  There are tools like b4 or
patchwork that will blindly add all tags, and then it's up to the
maintainer to remove any b.s. tags that maintainer doesn't feel up to
the subsystem's standards.

						- Ted