[Mageia-dev] Collaboration policy

[Colin Guthrie]

'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/

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