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

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Message-Id: <20260113193319.701e5799059eb642bbfc9a04@linux-foundation.org>
Date: Tue, 13 Jan 2026 19:33:19 -0800
From: Andrew Morton <akpm@...ux-foundation.org>
To: Ian Rogers <irogers@...gle.com>
Cc: Joe Perches <joe@...ches.com>, 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 Mon, 5 Jan 2026 09:13:49 -0800 Ian Rogers <irogers@...gle.com> wrote:

> On Mon, Jan 5, 2026 at 8:46 AM Joe Perches <joe@...ches.com> wrote:
> >
> > On Mon, 2026-01-05 at 07:39 -0800, Ian Rogers wrote:
> > > I was the author of it. The patch passed checkpatch.pl but then
> > > created a commit with missing tags - ie it was broken. This patch is
> > > fixing this issue so that checkpatch.pl will warn about the missing
> > > tags prior to the patch being sent to LKML, which is kind of
> > > checkpatch.pl's purpose. This is all detailed in the commit message.
> >
> > Whatever was the tool that applied the patch should be fixed instead.
> 
> The tool was git. As I mentioned, we can patch git but old versions
> will still have the '^---' rather than '^---$' behavior and so these
> checkpatch.pl tests remain useful.
> 

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.