linux-kernel - Re: [PATCH v1] checkpatch: Warn about sign offs if there's an accidental patch separator

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Message-ID: <f416e85d21ebd2058c2ea03f721f5ef7476009c2.camel@perches.com>
Date: Wed, 14 Jan 2026 10:20:34 -0800
From: Joe Perches <joe@...ches.com>
To: Andrew Morton <akpm@...ux-foundation.org>, Ian Rogers
 <irogers@...gle.com>
Cc: Kuan-Wei Chiu <visitorckw@...il.com>, Dwaipayan Ray	
 <dwaipayanray1@...il.com>, Lukas Bulwahn <lukas.bulwahn@...il.com>, Stephen
 Rothwell <sfr@...b.auug.org.au>, Andy Whitcroft <apw@...onical.com>,
 linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org,  Namhyung Kim <namhyung@...nel.org>
Subject: Re: [PATCH v1] checkpatch: Warn about sign offs if there's an
 accidental patch separator

On Tue, 2026-01-13 at 19:33 -0800, Andrew Morton wrote:
> I was bitten by this recently.  Someone's changelog had
> 
> ----------- stuff here
> 
> and git-quiltimport remove half the changelog and all the metadata.
> 
> git is wrong.  I say so coz I invented the --- convention. 
> submitting-patches.rst says
> 
> 	  - A marker line containing simply ``---``.
> 
> The astonishingly old https://www.ozlabs.org/~akpm/stuff/tpp.txt says
> "...  scripts will treat a ^--- string as ...".  I regret not
> explicitly using "^---$".
> 
> I'd like checkpatch to emit a warning in this case.  If a line starts
> with --- then please let's warn the user that downstream tooling will
> screw this up.

Maybe something like this:
---
 scripts/checkpatch.pl | 8 ++++++++
 1 file changed, 8 insertions(+)

diff --git a/scripts/checkpatch.pl b/scripts/checkpatch.pl
index e0f1d6a6bc636..8dd58710302bc 100755
--- a/scripts/checkpatch.pl
+++ b/scripts/checkpatch.pl
@@ -3035,6 +3035,14 @@ sub process {
 			}
 		}
 
+# Check for invalid patch separator
+		if ($in_commit_log &&
+		    $line =~ /^---.+/) {
+			ERROR("BAD_PATCH_SEPARATOR",
+			      "Invalid patch separator - some tools may have problems applying this\n" . $herecurr)
+		}
+		
+
 # Check for patch separator
 		if ($line =~ /^---$/) {
 			$has_patch_separator = 1;