Adding meta-tags when pulling patches from third parties

[Mauro Carvalho Chehab]

I'm using Mercurial for handling patch series for drivers/media tree at
Linux Kernel. However, during to the way we work at LinuxTV community,
we have some troubles on keeping using mercurial for this.

Basically, when a subsystem maintainer receives a changeset, it is
required by Kernel best practices that the maintainer adds a new tag at
the commit comments (Signed-off-by). However, I can't see any reasonable
way for doing this. At the end, this means extra manual work, when
converting the patches to -git, and the Mercurial history loses all
those stuff. Things are even worse if the changesets came from a
sub-subsystem tree.

I've already tried to use the following procedure:

	hg export (from the pull request tree for hg outgoing patchsets)
	edit changeset, adding the changeset
	hg import to the master tree

But this wont solve, due to two problems:

a) hg pull from master tree will pull the already-applied patches again.
So, history will be broken. Also, hg outgoing will show patches that
were already applied.

b) the patches will be rebased against the newest tree. So, the original
timestamp will be damaged.

I was wandering if there is other solutions for this kind of trouble I'm
suffering.

-- 
Cheers,
Mauro