The existing policy correctly separates AI tool attribution (Assisted-by:) from legal accountability (Signed-off-by:). In practice, contributors increasingly work across pseudonymous and legal-name contexts, and a third slot -- identifying the human sovereign identity under which the work was performed -- lets downstream tooling (CI, provenance trackers, identity systems) bind a commit to a stable handle without disturbing the DCO.
Add Acted-By: as an optional, informational companion trailer. It does not replace Signed-off-by:, does not change DCO requirements, and does not mandate any format; the out-of-tree draft-morrison-identity-attributed-commits defines one such scheme, but contributors are free to use any handle form they prefer. The three trailers then map cleanly: * Assisted-by: -- what tool drafted this * Acted-By: -- who the human was, as a handle * Signed-off-by: -- legal DCO attestation This mirrors the informal separation already present in commits that carry both a pseudonymous Reported-by: and a separate Signed-off-by:. Signed-off-by: Blake Morrison <[email protected]> --- Documentation/process/coding-assistants.rst | 13 +++++++++++++ 1 file changed, 13 insertions(+) diff --git a/Documentation/process/coding-assistants.rst b/Documentation/process/coding-assistants.rst index 899f4459c..b1d2d2f66 100644 --- a/Documentation/process/coding-assistants.rst +++ b/Documentation/process/coding-assistants.rst @@ -57,3 +57,16 @@ Basic development tools (git, gcc, make, editors) should not be listed. Example:: Assisted-by: Claude:claude-3-opus coccinelle sparse + +Contributors may optionally add an ``Acted-By:`` tag identifying the +human sovereign identity under which the work was performed, in a form +stable across pseudonymous and legal-name contexts:: + + Acted-By: handle + +``Acted-By:`` is informational. It does not replace ``Signed-off-by:``; +DCO attestation remains mandatory. Where ``Assisted-by:`` identifies +*what tooling* contributed, ``Acted-By:`` identifies *who* the human +was, as a stable handle. Handle format is out of scope for this +document; draft-morrison-identity-attributed-commits in the IETF +document stream describes one such scheme. -- 2.53.0
