Re: [PATCH 0/7] Nexus One Support

[Brian Swetland]

On Sat, Jan 22, 2011 at 11:49 AM, Nicolas Pitre <nico@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On Sat, 22 Jan 2011, Brian Swetland wrote:
>
>> All we ask is that some reasonable acknowledgement of original
>> authorship is maintained for non-trivial work. ÂA 5-10 line patch that
>> deals with mechanical issues of board files or cleans stuff up is no
>> big deal. Â100s of lines that represent some real work is something
>> else.
>
> So... What about http://article.gmane.org/gmane.linux.ports.arm.msm/167 ?
> Is that good enough for you? ÂIf no, then could you please propose an
> alternative? ÂIf that is indeed good enough, then could we please move on?

Something like:

Based on code written by:
   <list of names>

is absolutely fine by me.  Including patch counts, etc, is not essential.


>> What would be useful would be a reasonable convention for
>> acknowledging multiple authors, perhaps something along the lines of:
>>
>> Author: Awesome Upstreamer <au@xxxxxxxxxxx> Âor ÂMain Author <main@xxxxxxxxxxx>
>> Committer: Awesome Upstreamer <au@xxxxxxxxxxx>
>> Subject: arm: msm8k: acpu clock management
>>
>> ... summary of the patch ...
>>
>> Original-Author: Joe Firmware Guy <joe@xxxxxxx>
>> Original-Author: Kernel Droid <droid@xxxxxxxxxxx>
>> Signed-off-by: ...
>>
>> Though I'm not sure "Original-Author" is the best phrasing here... ÂOr
>> perhaps just having the patch description end with "This patch is
>> based on original code by Joe Firmware Guy, Kernel Droid, etc is the
>> way to go. ÂI do think that for work where there is one clear original
>> author, it's nice to leave them as the Author, but at the end of the
>> day, provided the code's heading in the right direction and the
>> contributors are acknowledged, that's a detail.
>
> I think a free form list of contributors in the commit log should be
> fine, possibly adding them in CC to the patch submission as well.

That seems reasonable to me.

> There is a _huge_ value in the action of making code palatable for
> mainline inclusion and actually pushing that code into mainline. If you
> do it yourself next time instead of letting your code rot then no one
> might be tempted to stump on your authorship.

Certainly.  As long as we're acknowledging both the contributions of
those who wrote the code and those who are doing the heavy lifting to
get it upstream, we're happy.  We are, of course, working on doing
things better in the future -- the tegra2 efforts are a direct result
of our desire to get things right on a newer project.

Brian
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