[Mageia-dev] Collaboration policy

Thu Jun 21 17:22:12 CEST 2012

'Twas brillig, and Per Øyvind Karlsen at 20/06/12 02:05 did gyre and gimble:
+> 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?
+
+It's not solely about crediting individual authors. It's designed to be
+a set of guidelines for working with other groups as well as other
+people. It's certainly not set in stone and there are other opinions on
+the topic than mine, so I don't want my general take on things to be
+seen as anything concrete.
+
+It's also important to note the distinction between two classes outlined
+in the document: packages and software. These have to be handled
+different and each treated on with their own set of rules (albeit
+governed by the same general principles overall).
+
+> But now you're replacing it with practical value in changelogs, which
+> is an entirely different issue about a totally different subject!
+
+I agree it would be different if the subject were specifically about
+"crediting authors" but it's not. I guess the subject is best summed up
+as "collaboration guidelines". There are obviously huge crossovers
+there, but there is a distinction and practicalities have to factor too
+if people are to be expected to follow it. If it takes ten minutes to do
+a complex report on authorship before committing a simple fix, it's
+clearly not going to win much favour!
+
+> 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).
+
+Well it somewhat depends on how you look at it I think. I don't
+necessarily disagree with your statements, but if I look at Fedora's
+git, Mandriva's svn or the (horrible) bundle of patches that is the
+Ubuntu/Debian diff thingy, then I'm benefiting from the fact that the
+distro has collected these fixes and made them available conveniently
+for me (with various values of "convenient" with the deb patches!).
+Likewise if I simply search a mailing list of an upstream project should
+I not credit them for proving a known, easy location for me to find such
+fixes?
+
+Perhaps not, but I certainly appreciate the effort that Fedora et al go
+to in this regard and find it a massively useful resource for me when
+I'm fixing bugs and hacking on things.
+
+I guess you could argue that you should credit the individual packager
+inside Fedora for their work in collecting it together rather than the
+generic entity, but again, I personally feel that I am representing
+Mageia when I do my packaging and if I manage to unearth a patch from
+somewhere and include it in a Mageia package and a Fedora packager sees
+that and subsequently uses it, I'm more than happy for this work (of
+finding, applying and testing the patch) to be credited generically
+under the "Mageia" project (and again, this isn't just about credit,
+it's also leaving an audit trail for the future).
+
+> 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!
+
+I'm not sure what you mean by this statement.
+
+Typically, in any given package shipped, the individual authors who
+contributed code to the (upstream) project are not included in the
+(downstream) package changelog. In most software the upstream project
+is, by definition, referenced in the software name itself. I would
+suggest that any individual who contributed code to the upstream project
+does not expect to be named explicitly in any downstream changelog of
+the builds of that project (after all that's what the traditional
+AUTHORS file that is typically included in the package if for), but
+rather accepts that the name of the software itself represents them and
+their contribution to it.
+
+In this regard, I see the same being true when taking a patch from
+Fedora or Mandriva - i.e. credit the "upstream" generically (I use
+"upstream" in quotes here as if I take a patch that is only available in
+a fedora package for e.g. systemd, then fedora is the effective
+"upstream" for this particular change - perhaps "sidestream" is the
+better term?)
+
+So think of this point as a log of "where I, as a packager, got this
+from" rather than anything that explicitly credits individuals. Of
+course you may want to follow the chain a little to see if Fedora got it
+from somewhere first etc. and if so I think that's fine.
+
+As stated previously however, it is highly desirable to have the actual
+author listed inside the patch itself. Git makes this nice and easy and
+I don't want to de-emphasis this part of the process.
+
+Again, this is just my opinion and take on things - it's certainly not
+gospel.
+
+> 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 
+
+As above, I'm not really sure what you'd need to change if Mandriva
+adopted a similar set of guidelines. AFAICT all that would be needed is
+to ensure that commit messages on packages referenced any "sidestream"
+you happened to use. Can you clarify a bit here so I can understand
+properly? (or did you maybe mean Red Hat rather than that last reference
+to Mandriva above because Mand[riva|rake] was originally based on it?)
+
+Perhaps there is a context problem here too. Are you talking primarily
+about package svn commits here (and thus changelogs) or software
+repository commits?
+
+> 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..
+
+I don't consider this meddling personally. I value your feedback here,
+but I don't fully understand some of your arguments so any
+clarifications you can provide would be appreciated.
+
+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/
+
+
+