Upstream Patch Attribution and Traceability Errors

[Joey STANFORD]

Hi Everyone,

I wanted to remind you about two important things to consider when
writing your patch comments for Linaro.  I've been seeing some
occasional upstream patches lately which have problems with a)
attributions in the comments and b) traceability.

So please...

1) Use your Linaro email address if you have it and also include your
member/partner company

e.g.  Joey Stanford <joey at linaro.org> for the Samsung Landing Team
e.g.  Joey Stanford <joey at linaro.org> assigned to Linaro from IBM
e.g.  Joey Stanford <joey at personaladdress.net> for Linaro

Currently I see patches submitted as "Joey Stanford
<joey at canonical.com>" with no reference to Linaro at all.   This is a
problem firstly because we aren't attributing the code fully and
secondly it reduces the awareness in the Open Source community of the
benefits Linaro brings to the table.


2) If your work is based upon a bug or blueprint in Launchpad, or any
other system for that matter, please:

a) Put these in the bzr/git revision log via commit comment. Most of
you are doing this and it's great. If you aren't, please do this.
b) Consider including that in the comments for traceability.

e.g. Fix for audio stack failure on IMX.53 Launchpad Bug #123
e.g. Implement Graphics acceleration on Origen,  Google Code Issue #123

Today we are aware of some of our members who are grep'ing patch
comments, but not revision logs, to extract this information and are
not finding the details of what the patch fixes.  I realize this
somewhat of an edge case but every bit helps for traceability.

Thanks,

Joey

-- 
Joey STANFORD
Engineering Program Manager
Office: +1-303-800-6609

http://www.linaro.org/
Open source software for ARM SoCs