Configuring Git

This chapter describes maintainer level git configuration.

Tagged branches used in pull requests (see Documentation/maintainer/pull-requests.rst) should be signed with the developers public GPG key. Signed tags can be created by passing -u <key-id> to git tag. However, since you would usually use the same key for the project, you can set it in the configuration and use the -s flag. To set the default key-id use::

git config user.signingkey "keyname"

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

[user]
	name = Jane Developer
	email = [email protected]
	signingkey = [email protected]

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 https://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-I[dD]:\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