[Mageia-dev] Collaboration policy

Wed Jun 20 03:05:15 CEST 2012

2012/6/18 Colin Guthrie <mageia at colin.guthr.ie>:
+> '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.
+Then you're mixing two different things, this thing was about credting
+authors, right?
+But now you're replacing it with practical value in changelogs, which
+is an entirely different issue about a totally different subject!
+If you want to actually credit the person doing the work, then you
+need to credit the actual authors of the work itself, a distribution
+is certainly not what to be creditting itself for the work done by
+others, they were the ones who put the distribution together, not the
+distribution who put them together (lacking consciousness, thus no
+assurance needs to fill, desire for recognition not possible).
+If you're going to push this argument a bit further, for anything else
+of software in the distribution that we've packaged with it, neither
+would the authors of this software be the ones to be creditted for
+their work, but rather the distribution carrying it!
+
+So if in Mandriva, we'd actually were to fully recognize your
+arguments adopt this policy which you propose for Mageia iin Mandriva
+again, we'd have to start mess with all the rest of the software we
+ship to make sure that it credits Mandriva as we're carrying their
+work (I'd veto against this, no matter what anyone else might try
+propose and pushing)!
+And while I myself actually don't wanna meddle in Mageia's businiss
+(despite mine being meddled in first), I *really* don't think Mageia
+should do so either..
+
+And I *really* hope that this extremely bizarre example illustrates
+for you that it's not even remotely far out at all.
+
+I just find this awkward, and not on my part, so I'll just leave it
+with that.. :|
+
+--
+Getta grip,
+Per Øyvind
+