"Last month, at the kernel summit, there was discussion of putting a Reviewed-by: tag onto patches to document the oversight they had received on their way into the mainline," began Jonathan Corbet in an effort to define the meaning of the recently introduced reviewed-by tag. He continued, "that tag has made an occasional appearance since then, but there has not yet been a discussion of what it really means. So it has not yet brought a whole lot of value to the process."

In the continued discussion, it was requested that all commit tags be defined, prompting Jonathan to update his documentation to include Signed-off-by, Acked-by, Cc, and Tested-by along with his documentation for Reviewed-by. He offered the following definition for the new Reviewed-by tag:

"The patch has been reviewed and found acceptible according to the Reviewer's Statement as found at the bottom of this file. A Reviewed-by tag is a statement of opinion that the patch is an appropriate modification of the kernel without any remaining serious technical issues. Any interested reviewer (who has done the work) can offer a Reviewed-by tag for a patch."