[dpdk-dev] Understanding of Acked-By

[Thomas Monjalon]

2017-01-25 13:53, Van Haaren, Harry:
> There was an idea (from Thomas) to better document the Acked-by and Reviewed-By in the above thread, which I think is worth doing to make the process clearer. I'll kick off a thread*, and offer to submit a patch for the documentation when a consensus is reached.
> 
> 
> The question that needs to be addressed is "What is the most powerful signoff to add as somebody who checked a patch?"

I do not see the benefit of knowing the most powerful.
Anyway, the most powerful tags are done by trusted people.
And people are trusted after delivering good reviews or patches ;)

The question should be "How to use the tags?"

> The documentation mentions Acked, Reviewed, and Tested by[1], as signoffs that can be commented on patches. The Review Process[2] section mentions Reviewed and Tested by, but nowhere specifically states what any of these indicate.
> 
> Offered below is my current understanding of the Acked-by; Reviewed-by; and Tested-by tags, in order of least-powerful first:
> 
> 
> 3) Tested-by: (least powerful)
>   - Indicates having passed testing of functionality, and works as expected for Tester
>   - Does NOT include full code review (instead use Reviewed by)
>   - Does NOT indicate that the Tester understands architecture (instead use Acked by)
> 
> 
> 2) Reviewed-by:
>   - Indicates having passed code-review, checkpatch and compilation testing by Reviewer

Compilation testing is done by the CI.
The reviewer must just check the results.

>   - Does NOT include full testing of functionality (instead use Tested-by)
>   - Does NOT indicate that the Reviewer understands architecture (instead use Acked by)

I disagree here.
The reviewer must understand the impacts of the patch.
That's why a Reviewed-by tag is really strong.

> 1) Acked-by: (most powerful)
>    - Indicates Reviewed-by, but also:

A maintainer may want to approve the intent without doing a full review,
especially if he trusts the author or the reviewers.
That's why I think Acked-by should not include Reviewed-by.
If a maintainer does a full review, he should use Reviewed-by instead of Acked-by.

>    - Acker understands impact to architecture (if any) and agrees with changes
>    - Acker has performed runtime sanity check

Not sure about this one.
Personnaly I give some Acks without testing sometimes.
We may add a Tested-by to indicate we made some tests.

>    - Requests "please merge" to maintainer

Yes, "please merge" to tree maintainer (committer).

>    - Level of trust in Acked-by based on previous contributions to DPDK/networking community

The level of trust applies to any tag or comment.

> The above is a suggested interpretation, alternative interpretations welcomed.

Thanks Harry