Makes sense to me except a nit (inline).

On Fri, Nov 20, 2020 at 9:20 AM Josh Elser <[email protected]> wrote:

> Hi!
>
> As most of you know, we've been using the "Signed-off-by: <name>
> <email>" line in out commit messages more and more lately to indicate
> who reviewed some change.
>
> We've recently had an event in which one of these Signed-off-by lines
> showed up with someone's name who didn't consider themselves to have
> signed-off on the change. This is akin to saying someone gave a +1 for
> some change when they did not. As an RTC community, that's worrisome.
>
> I went reading the HBase book and was surprised to not find guidance on
> how we expect this to work, so I'd like to have some discussion about
> how we should treat these lines. I'll start this off by making
> suggestions about what seems reasonable to me.
>
> When a committer is applying some change in a commit:
>
> * All individuals mentioned in a sign-off *must* be capable of giving a
> binding vote (i.e. they are an HBase committer)
>

It appears that the original intent
<http://web.archive.org/web/20160507011446/http://gerrit.googlecode.com/svn/documentation/2.0/user-signedoffby.html>of
this sign-off feature in git mandates that the signing-off party to be a
maintainer. So agree with you in theory. However, most times non-committers
also give great feedback and help with the code review process (code
reviews, testing, perf etc). I think acknowledging their contribution in
some form would be nice and that encourages potential-future-committers to
actively review PRs IMO. So how about we annotate their names with
Reviewed-by tags? A related discussion
<https://lists.x.org/archives/xorg-devel/2009-October/003036.html> on a
different open source project has more tag definitions if we are interested
in taking that route.

(I know you are only talking about the "signed-off by" tag but I thought
this discussion would be relevant when documenting this in the dev
guidelines, hence bringing it up). What do you think?


> * Any individual in a sign-off *must* have given approval via an
> explicit "+1" or the "Approved" via the Github Pull Request review
> function.
> * Approval *must* be publicly visible and memorialized on the code
> review (e.g. no private emails or chat message to give approval)
> * The committer _should_ (not *must*) create a sign-off line for each
> binding reviewer who gave approval
>
> I think these are generally how we have been operating, but it would be
> good to make sure they are documented as such.
>
> Thoughts/concerns?
>
> - Josh
>

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