On 2025-08-07, Alejandro Colomar [off-list ref] wrote:

Hi Aleksa,

On Thu, Aug 07, 2025 at 11:27:04PM +1000, Aleksa Sarai wrote:

quoted

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I think 'author' is more appropriate than 'developer' for documentation.
It is also more consistent with the Copyright notice, which assigns
copyright to the authors (documented in AUTHORS).  And ironically, even
the kernel documentation about Co-authored-by talks about authorship

(Oops, s/Co-authored-by/Co-developed-by/)

quoted

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instead of development:

	Co-developed-by: states that the patch was co-created by
	multiple developers; it is used to give attribution to
	co-authors (in addition to the author attributed by the From:
	tag) when several people work on a single patch.

Sure, fixed.

Can you also clarify whether CONTRIBUTING.d/patches/range-diff is
required for submissions? I don't think b4 supports including it (and I
really would prefer to not have to use raw git-send-email again just for
man-pages -- b4 has so many benefits over raw git-send-email). Is the
b4-style changelog I include in the cover-letter sufficient?

Yes, that's sufficient.  As Captain Barbossa would say, "the code is
more what you'd call 'guidelines' than actual rules".  ;)

quoted

I like to think of myself as a fairly prolific git user, but I don't
think I've ever seen --range-diff= output in a git-send-email patch
before...

Yup, I only learnt about a few years ago.  I have to say it's great as
a reviewer; it changed my efficiency reviewing code when we started
using it at $dayjob-1.

And even as a submitter, it has also saved me a few times, when I
introduced a regression in some revision of a patch set, and I could
easily trace back to the revision where I had introduced it by reading
the range diffs, which are much shorter than the actual code.

Maybe we could ping Konstantin to add this to b4?

Konstantin, would you be interested in a patch to add --range-diff to
the trailing bits of cover letters? I would guess that b4 already has
all of the necessary metadata to reference the right commits.

It seems like a fairly neat way of providing some more metadata about
changes between patchsets, for folks that care about that information.

-- 
Aleksa Sarai
Senior Software Engineer (Containers)
SUSE Linux GmbH
https://www.cyphar.com/