[Mageia-dev] Collaboration policy

Mon Jun 18 00:16:31 CEST 2012

'Twas brillig, and Olivier Blin at 14/06/12 22:25 did gyre and gimble:
+> David Walser <luigiwalser at yahoo.com> writes:
+> 
+>> Olivier Blin <mageia at ...> writes:
+>>> Crediting patchs from others by only mentionning the source
+>>> (i.e. Mandriva, Fedora, XBMC, ...) is not enough IMHO.
+>>>
+>>> If we want to give proper credits, we should also mention the author of
+>>> the patch.
+>>
+>> It doesn't say we don't give credit to the patch author.  It just says in our
+>> package changelog (a.k.a. our SVN commit messages), you mention where you got
+>> the patch from, because at that level you want to be concise and that's a much
+>> more useful piece of information.
+> 
+> It says that we prefer to mention "source" over "author".
+> That's not good enough IMHO if we want to be ok with credits.
+> The "source" is not the one retaining the copyright on a change, only
+> the author owns this.
+> And mentionning an author's name is the minimum reward when
+> cherry-picking a change.
+
+Well IMO, this is a trade off that relates to practical usefulness.
+
+The options for the commit message are:
+ 1. Mention the source
+ 2. Mention the author
+ 3. Mention both source+author
+
+IMO 3 is too verbose for package changelogs, but I agree it would be
+nice to be able to do this if it were made concise.
+
+I also think that 2 is not ideal as this would then make it harder to
+record the source. We'd either have to write a comment in the spec above
+the PatchNN: line or put something into the patch itself to indicate the
+source. This is typically a good idea anyway (I try to put any fedora
+patches etc. in their own little section of the spec). If patches are
+generated from git then you don't really want to add unmanaged extra
+info in the patch file as when it is regenerated, this information would
+be lost.
+
+The opposite is not true - if option 1 were picked, then the author
+would typically be included already in the patch itself if it is a git
+formatted patch. I accept this is not always the case, so this isn't a
+fool-proof alternative.
+
+
+
+So, in the end, I'm not against mentioning the author directly in commit
+messages, but I think it's somewhat impractical and thus it is my
+opinion that it should not be in the message.
+
+It is, of course, open to discussion so further opinions on this topic
+are more than welcome.
+
+Cheers
+
+Col
+
+
+
+
+-- 
+
+Colin Guthrie
+colin(at)mageia.org
+http://colin.guthr.ie/
+
+Day Job:
+  Tribalogic Limited http://www.tribalogic.net/
+Open Source:
+  Mageia Contributor http://www.mageia.org/
+  PulseAudio Hacker http://www.pulseaudio.org/
+  Trac Hacker http://trac.edgewall.org/
+
+
+