On Wed, Mar 23, 2005 at 06:36:06PM -0500, mental@...3... wrote:
Quoting Jon Phillips <jon@...235...>:
hopefully we can maintain our revision history as well.
Actually since a lot of folks seem to have neglected adding copyright statements when they add stuff, and also don't always bother to update the ChangeLog, it's kind of critical. We don't have any other complete record of who did what...
This was brought to my attention recently, and is NOT COOL.
Also, there is a tool called cvs2cl that can collect the changelog info from CVS. I find it too messy for automated changelog generation, but it's a handy tool nonetheless. I will run it on cvs and save a copy of the changelog right now just in case.
For those who don't like writing a changelog entry after they've just done a cvs commit message, it may be worth your while to see if you can derive something from cvs2cl.
For anyone who finds having to comment their changes to be an irritating chore, look at the change processes used by projects like gcc or the kernel or any GNU project; Inkscape's change processes are extremely lightweight in comparison. ;-)
For future reference, the ground rules are basically:
- Anything more than ~10 lines or so warrants a copyright notice.
I think four is the lower legal limit for copyright in the US.
- If you're not comfortable with simply adding your name and
copyright dates to an existing copyright/license notice because of wording/etc, don't edit it, but rather insert your own notice above the existing one (this includes public domain dedications!).
- The copyright notice does need to spell out which license
applies. Generally for us this should be GPL 2(+) or a public domain dedication.
- Don't add a copyright notice on someone else's behalf; the
original author needs to do it for themselves, or submit a patch to do it if they don't have commit access
- As an author of code, assign the copyright to yourself or your
employer (as appropriate), not a fictional "Inkscape" organization. Pseudonyms that have a real person behind them are nominally okay though as long as there's a clear identity and it's something you normally use.
-mental
I agree with all this, with the addition that email addresses should be included (preferrably ones that won't bitrot 5 years hence). In past projects I've gone through a relicensing process that was extremely difficult due to invalid email addresses; we had to toss out a lot of otherwise good material because we could not reach its copyright holder.
Mental, can you add this list to the developer's guide in Wiki?
Bryce