Real name vs. known identity in contributions

one-d-wide one-d-wide at protonmail.com
Wed Jan 10 05:33:37 PST 2024


Hi,

I'm new to openwrt and recently I have submitted github pull request to openwrt/packages repository. Unfortunately I was refused to contribute under my usual nickname due to real-name-only rule. And it seems I'm not the only one who faced this problem ([1], [2], [3], [4]), so I decided to ask for clarifications here.

[1]: https://github.com/openwrt/packages/pull/17993#issuecomment-1059783673
[2]: https://github.com/openwrt/packages/pull/20312#issuecomment-1601308511
[3]: https://github.com/openwrt/packages/pull/22060#issuecomment-1751717855
[4]: https://github.com/openwrt/packages/pull/20540#issuecomment-1443679327

The aforementioned rule is listed on [submitting-patches] page in openwrt wiki:

[submitting-patches]: https://openwrt.org/submitting-patches

> ## Submissions should follow the following guidelines:
>
> ...
>
> * **all commits must contain `Signed-off-by: My Name <my at email.address>`
>   where you write your real name and real email address**, in accordance with
>   [Section 11 of the Linux Kernel patches guide]
>
> ...

[Section 11 of the Linux Kernel patches guide]: https://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/tree/Documentation/process/submitting-patches.rst?id=HEAD#n416

I believe that the explicit requirement of real name isn't up to date with the upstream and doesn't reflect the original intent of the [Section 11 of the Linux Kernel patches guide] which was clarified by Linus in February 2023. See the [linux kernel commit] description and changes.

[linux kernel commit]: https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/commit/Documentation/process/submitting-patches.rst?id=d4563201f33a022fc0353033d9dfeb1606a88330

tldr; Linux now accepts known identities for contributions and does not require real names anymore. (Taken from [Jan-Niklas's mail].)

This issue had been already mentioned in [Jan-Niklas's mail] and [Petr's mail] via openwrt-adm mailing list, but no action to update openwrt wiki had been taken since.

[Jan-Niklas's mail]: https://lists.openwrt.org/pipermail/openwrt-adm/2023-February/002358.html
[Petr's mail]: https://lists.openwrt.org/pipermail/openwrt-adm/2023-February/002364.html

I'd like to ask openwrt core developers to revisit the aforementioned rule as it has been proven to cause misunderstanding in the community.

With best regards,
one-d-wide



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