[Mageia-sysadm] something to not forget in case of svn import

Tue Nov 23 16:07:37 CET 2010

Le mardi 23 novembre 2010 à 11:10 +0100, Romain d'Alverny a écrit :
+> On Tue, Nov 23, 2010 at 03:35, Michael Scherer <misc at zarb.org> wrote:
+> >
+> > I just realized something :
+> > if we do import svn from mandriva, we need somehow to keep the same
+> > login, or we will end up with some confusion ( and copyright
+> > misattribution, I fear ).
+> >
+> > For example, dams at mageia is not the same than dams at mandriva, to
+> > name the first case that will likely cause trouble :/
+> 
+> It's the same physical person here, so the same author. Only the
+> context has changed (he's not employed by the same entity).
+> 
+> The trouble would be that someone else uses the same "dams" username.
+
+It is. Dams at mandriva is damien krotkine. Our dams had another login
+back in that time.
+
+> Moreover, copyright attribution is time-specific. So what happened to
+> code written/committed by dams before 2010 Sept. is authored by him
+> and copyright exercise right is attributed to Mandriva. Code
+> written/committed by dams after 2010 Sept. is his only (unless a new
+> employer requires copyright attribution through contract).
+> 
+> So I don't see a specific issue here or I did not understand it?
+
+There is 2 issues. We have packages, and we have software ( or
+assimilated ).
+
+For packages :
+
+Let's imagine that we import the svn, with history.
+If I look at the svn changelog, how do I know that dams is not the
+same ? 
+
+And now, the tricky part : 
+since the changelog of rpm is created by looking at the changelog, and
+since the changelog serve as de facto copyright notice for rpm, how can
+we ensure they are properly generated ?
+
+For our case, we are lucky since the plan is to import srpm, and so the
+changelog from the srpm will be imported, and kept in svn to be readded
+to the new rpm once we modify it ( completed with the generated rpm
+changelog by using svn changelog ).
+
+So no problem ( if changelog is complete of course, and I am not sure it
+is, we need to check this ).
+
+( I know, all of that to say there is no problem. )
+
+
+For software ( or assimilated, ie everything non related to rpm packages
+that is a text file stored in svn ) :
+For this, no rpm changelog involved. Maybe no changelog file either,
+depending on the software.
+It used to be written from the svn/cvs changelog for some software,
+maybe blino can tell us more about it.
+
+So if we want to be clean, we should ensure that copyright notice are up
+to date in every source file before import, because we will not be able
+to do that later by relying on svn.
+
+
+> > So, how could we do ?
+> > ( I think we could rename upon import, I guess ).
+> 
+> We can do that? (reattributing to dams at mandriva for "old" dams)
+
+Depend on how we reimport, but yes, I think that tailor could do it.
+
+That also mean that we may also monitor incoming account creation to
+prevent the problem from happening again in the future.
+
+Ie, what if someone create a account eugeni while not being the same as
+Mandriva ? Would it have a impact ( besides statistics among others ) ?
+
+We can decide to reserve some accounts to give it back to mandriva
+people.
+
+We could suffix every account when we import svn history ( except that
+most people have kept the same user name so we could suffix unless
+people have kept the same account ).
+
+Or we could always use option 3, ignore it. 
+
+-- 
+Michael Scherer
+
+