SubmittingPatches: discourage common Linux trailers

The Linux Kernel regularly uses trailers (or “tags”) `Fixes` and `Link`. Sometimes people submit patches to this project with them. They have their use in that project but it is not clear what purpose they would serve here. For `Fixes`: Linux has many trees, and applying patches with cherry-picks is common. A `Fixes` trailer in commit C2 pointing to commit C1 helps the cherry-picker figure out that she probably needs C2 if she wants to apply C1. See linux/d5d6281a (checkpatch: check for missing Fixes tags, 2024-06-11):[1] Why are stable patches encouraged to have a fixes tag? Some people mark their stable patches as "# 5.10" etc. This is useful but a Fixes tag is still a good idea. For example, the Fixes tag helps in review. It helps people to not cherry-pick buggy patches without also cherry-picking the fix. In contrast the Git project has few trees (to my knowledge), and there is much less need to cherry-pick fixes as opposed to either using backmerges or rebasing all of the downstream tree’s commits on top of git.git `master` from time to time. This project does regularly mention what commits a patch/commit fixes, but that is done inline in the commit message proper (cf. the trailer block of the message). For `Link`: These are used both to link back to the patch submission as well as with footnotes. In contrast this project has `refs/notes/amlog` for linking back to the patch submissions, and footnotes are only used in the commit message proper. † 1: Commit linux/d5d6281a has “linux” in front of it since this commit is from the Linux Kernel, not Git. Example of a Linux tree—as well as an example of `Link`—is [2]. Link: https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/tree/ [2] Signed-off-by: Kristoffer Haugsbakk <code@khaugsbakk.name> Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>

Kristoffer Haugsbakk committed Jun 19, 2026 at 07:44 UTC b7f68ff5c92e40157da2afeecba13bf6f4fdd6db
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Documentation/SubmittingPatches
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@@ -476,6 +476,10 @@ While you can also create your own trailer if the situation warrants it, we
476 encourage you to instead use one of the common trailers in this project
477 highlighted above.
478
479 +Other projects might regularly refer to other kinds of data, like
480 +`Fixes:` and `Link:` in the Linux Kernel project, but these ones in
481 +particular are not used in this project.
482 +
483 Only capitalize the very first letter of the trailer, i.e. favor
484 "Signed-off-by" over "Signed-Off-By" and "Acked-by:" over "Acked-By".
485