Re: Crediting test authors

[<dan.j.williams@intel.com>]

Jakub Kicinski wrote:
> On Fri, 25 Jul 2025 09:38:28 -0700 dan.j.williams@intel.com wrote:
> > Jakub Kicinski wrote:
> > > Hi!
> > > 
> > > Does anyone have ideas about crediting test authors or tests for bugs
> > > discovered?  We increasingly see situations where someone adds a test
> > > then our subsystem CI uncovers a (1 in a 100 runs) bug using that test.
> > > 
> > > Using reported-by doesn't feel right. But credit should go to the
> > > person who wrote the test. Is anyone else having this dilemma?  
> > 
> > Is that not a "credit in the changelog" situation?
> > 
> > "Big thanks to DeveloperX for their recent TestY added with CommitZ for
> >  catching this case."
> 
> That's what we do usually, but I'm a strong believer in (LWN) statistics
> to help people justify the work they do upstream. Feels even more
> important for testing than feature development in a way.
> 
> So a tag would be ideal. But it's a hard nut to crack. Best I can come
> up with would be:
> 
> Reproducer: test.case.path # 001122aabb (optimal) commit of the test case
> 
> ? Could potentially be useful for backporters?

That's true, more than a few times I have had distro folks reach out to
ask "how do I verify this backport" and end up manually pointing to the
new unit test that backstops a fix.

Although, from that tag I would not know where to get the commit. Maybe:

Test: <git url>

...as a new Link: type?

> > Reported-by: Some CI Bot
> 
> I guess we'd need something like:
> 
> Reported-by: subsystem CI # Person Who <developed@the.test> ?

That looks like a useful convention so that the statistics gathering
script does not need to walk URLs to get author data.

Also:

Tested-by: validation person # test author

...might be another convention, because the validator likely has
interest in getting Cc'd on backports, while the tool author likely
wants the credit but not all the notifications on what happens with
fixes.