Signed-off-by and Reviewed-by tags

Mesa is discussing MR workflow regarding the gitlab Approve button and various tags in commit messages. It seems at least some of the Mesa drivers have stopped requiring any tag to be added to commit messages.

I think that is an option for Mesa because all Mesa commits are annotated with

Part-of: <https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/-/merge_requests/NUMBER>

and fdo is expected to keep the link alive forever, one way or another.

What do you think of the idea of not requiring tags, suppose we automatically append Part-of to all future commits? If that's a good idea, we can start doing that for Mesa virgl driver. I will need to look into how to add Part-of to commits automatically here for virglrenderer. Mesa uses https://github.com/smarkets/marge-bot, FWIW.

added Discussion label

changed the description

changed title from Signed-of-by and Reviewed-by tags to Signed-off-by and Reviewed-by tags

For mesa/virgl I'g go with the flow, i.e. do whatever is done there for the whole repo, simply to be consistent for the whole project, generally I'm in favour.

Speaking about this project: I think the Signed-off tags are not an issue - it is just a flag when committing, doesn't need a rewrite, and we use it loosely anyway.

Regarding the R-b: Since we currently have no boundaries between project parts, where we say that some people can only review for a specific part of the software, I thing switching to using the "Approve" button would make things easier and I'm generally in favour. The only problem is if one starts a review, and for some reason can't or doesn't want to finish it, and we would have a half-approved series.

Re Mesa: Mesa-wide policy still requires commit messages to be amended for r-b tags, but some individual drivers (panfrost, i915g, and freedreno) have stopped requiring that. For virgl, I am also in favor of not requiring that.

Re virglrenderer: I don't think a half-approved MR should be merged. It should get a Reviewed-by or Acked-by at least. The "Approve" button can mean either.

The problem to me is that the context is mising in the commit message, and it is hard to find the MR. I wonder if gitlab has built-in support to automatically amend commit messages to add MR links.

One can configure the git lab to rewrite the commit message to contain a link to the MR. In mesa MRs nowadays contain

Part-of: <https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/-/merge_requests/#####>

mentioned in merge request mesa/mesa!14954 (merged)

mentioned in merge request !705 (merged)

What remains to be done here? Just start using Marge and update the README.rst file about it?

That should be it to my understanding.

The main thing we want to get out of this is the Part-of link that Marge appends. But having the same flow as Mesa does is great to have.

Is there anything that remains to be done regarding this now that Marge is doing the merges?

closed

No. Thanks for the help!

mentioned in merge request !719 (merged)