[Mageia-dev] Collaboration policy

Per Øyvind Karlsen peroyvind at mandriva.org
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


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