Configure Git

This chapter describes maintainer level git configuration.

Tagged branches used in Documentation/maintainer/pull-requests.rst should be signed with the developers public GPG key. Signed tags can be created by passing the -u flag to git tag. However, since you would usually use the same key for the same project, you can set it once with

git config user.signingkey "keyname"

Alternatively, edit your .git/config or ~/.gitconfig file by hand:

[user]
        name = Jane Developer
        email = jd@domain.org
        signingkey = jd@domain.org

You may need to tell git to use gpg2

[gpg]
        program = /path/to/gpg2

You may also like to tell gpg which tty to use (add to your shell rc file)

export GPG_TTY=$(tty)

Creating commit links to lore.kernel.org

The web site http://lore.kernel.org is meant as a grand archive of all mail list traffic concerning or influencing the kernel development. Storing archives of patches here is a recommended practice, and when a maintainer applies a patch to a subsystem tree, it is a good idea to provide a Link: tag with a reference back to the lore archive so that people that browse the commit history can find related discussions and rationale behind a certain change. The link tag will look like this:

Link: https://lore.kernel.org/r/<message-id>

This can be configured to happen automatically any time you issue git am by adding the following hook into your git:

$ git config am.messageid true
$ cat >.git/hooks/applypatch-msg <<'EOF'
#!/bin/sh
. git-sh-setup
perl -pi -e 's|^Message-Id:\s*<?([^>]+)>?$|Link: https://lore.kernel.org/r/$1|g;' "$1"
test -x "$GIT_DIR/hooks/commit-msg" &&
        exec "$GIT_DIR/hooks/commit-msg" ${1+"$@"}
:
EOF
$ chmod a+x .git/hooks/applypatch-msg