Signed-off-by: Maxwell G gotmax@e.email

So… a signed-off-by when a project hasn't defined what signed-off-by means has negative value. There is no inherent meaning to it, nobody knows what exactly is being signed if the project didn't agree on that. And without an assigned meaning it doesn't mean anything, it's just noise. And if the project were to adopt some contract for signed-off-by in the future, suddenly those past signed-off-by's are a problem, because it's not clear what they mean. Do those contributors retroactively agree to the new meaning? Thus, despite many people treating signed-off-by as something that's always good, it's better to only use it for projects that request it.

At least in my mind, --signoff is synonymous with the DCO, but I agree it's pointless and potentially unhelpful to sign off when there's nothing to sign off on. I've gotten into the bad habit of signing off on everything, except Fedora dist-git PRs where all packagers have signed the FPCA and it's definitely unneeded[1], because it's annoying to have to go back and fix it after forgetting that a project requires it. Anyways, thanks for the pointer.

[1]: Apparently, this doesn't extend to SIGs and other groups' pagure repos. Some of these require signed-off-by through the repo's settings and don't define what that means.

I agree that numbering Patches doesn't make sense (since Rust packages just use %autosetup anyway and Patches are never referred to by number), but would adding back the numbering for Source files make sense? Those you actually need to refer to by number, for example if you want to package an upstream license file, manpage, etc. that's not shipped with published crate files.