Creating a tag to track partial reviews: "Consulted:"

[Joseph Myers]

On Thu, 8 May 2025, Carlos O'Donell wrote:

> My opinion is this:
> 
>  * If you approve of a portion of the patch, and do not want further
>    involvement then convert your Consulted: to Acked-by: since you are
>    now partially approving the patch.
> 
>  * If you do not yet approve the whole patch and want to continue to be
>    involved give a Consulted: and stay involved.
> 
>  * If you don't want to be further involved, respond to the thread and
>    ask for the Consulted: to be dropped.
> 
> Note: The kernel uses "CC:" for weaker recording of whom to contact.
> 
> Joseph, Does using Acked-by: solve the partial approval issue?

I think the complexity of these instructions illustrates the problems with 
trying to force all the ways people might contribute to the review of a 
patch into particular standard categories.

If we wish to thank reviewers in commit messages, it would seem better to 
me to have some tag with more free-form semantics to indicate the 
reviewers that the patch author feels made the most useful contributions 
to improving the patch (that is, a tag assigned by the patch author at 
commit time based on their opinion of the contributiosn made by the 
reviewers - not one claimed by the reviewers for themselves).

-- 
Joseph S. Myers
josmyers@redhat.com