Clarification for the use of additional fields in the message body

[Theodore Ts'o]

On Wed, Jul 08, 2015 at 09:05:53PM +1000, Julian Calaby wrote:
> If multiple people are submitting identical changes, then the one that
> is applied is the one the maintainer sees first, which will most
> likely be determined by which one hit their inbox / list first. Nobody
> is going to look at timestamps in emails to determine which one will
> be applied.

And some maintainers may choose *not* to act on a patch first, even if
they see it first.  They might be focused on bug fix patches, and not
act on cleanup or feature patches until -rc3 or rc4.  Or maybe they
will use separate branches for "urgent_for_linus" patches, so two
different patchs may end up in completely different git flows.

> If you're worried about which one of several versions of a patch will
> be applied, change the subject to [PATCH v2] ..... instead of [PATCH]
> .... for the second version.

*Please* do this.  In fact, this is the one thing I wish git
send-email would do automatically, along with having a place to edit
and track the 0/N summary patch.

> >> To be honest, I've only ever used that timestamp for reporting
> >> purposes at work, and I'd be surprised if anyone was doing anything
> >> other than that with them.
> >
> > Thanks for your detailed feedback.

Note also that some maintainers have work flow that deliberately smash
the date (i.e., because they are using a system such as guilt), so if
you are depending on the submitted timestamp, it's going to break on
you.

							- Ted