Create non-email method of contributing kernel patches

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Summary
Create non-email method of contributing kernel patches
Proposer
Tim Bird

Description

A consistent problem for "industry" developers is problems using their e-mail client for submitting patches to mainline. In particular, many industry developers work for companies whose IT policies dictate that they use Outlook as their email client and Exchange as their email server. These two programs are problematical to use for submitting patches to the kernel. They sometimes mess up the text formatting of the patches. Often, Exchange will be configured to automatically add confidentiality notices to outgoing email. These notices conflict with the intent of publishing the patch, and emails containing such notices will not be applied by upstream maintainers.

The purpose of this project is to create a method of submitting patches to the mainline Linux kernel community that is independent of any particular e-mail client or configuration, and that thus does not suffer from the problems mentioned.

Note that this project is limited in scope to just the submission of patches to the community mailing lists and addresses. It does not address the further problem of responding to feedback on the patches, from those corporate-mandated email programs. That is, Outlook doesn't handle inline commenting properly, and either Outlook or Exchange may mangle the text for emails related to patch reviews. For the purpose of this project, this is considered a secondary consideration, as it is possible to use gmail or some other email account external to the company to respond to feedback.

The primary motivations for allowing a non-email submission, rather than just have people use gmail accounts for their submissions are:

  • it is desirable to have the author of the patch attributed to the email address
  • ...

[under construction]


Related work

Scope

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Contractor Candidates

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Comments

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