Kindness and open-source projects
Kindness and open-source projects
Posted Jul 4, 2018 13:29 UTC (Wed) by gioele (subscriber, #61675)In reply to: Kindness and open-source projects by mjthayer
Parent article: Kindness and open-source projects
> We tend to credit the submitter even when we rework the patch quite substantially. Of course, in Subversion there is no direct patch-to-commit conversion like in Git, so the bar to reworking is probably lower.
At the same time, putting somebody else's name on something they haven't authored may be perilous. What if that commit ends up introducing a subtle bug in the reworked part?
I personally see only three acceptable choices (after a bit of back and forth with the original contributor):
1. if the commit is OK, let's just merge it;
2. if the commit is not OK, I will rework it and add a Reported-By tag;
3. if the commit is _almost_ OK, I will merge the commit in another branch, do what needs to be done in another commit in that branch and finally merge that branch.
Posted Jul 5, 2018 13:19 UTC (Thu)
by ecree (guest, #95790)
[Link]
The kernel solution for the "almost OK" case is to put a square-bracketed note in between SOB lines, to indicate a sign-off under option (b) of the DCoO instead of option (c). Something like (example from SubmittingPatches):
Kindness and open-source projects
Signed-off-by: Random J Developer <random@developer.example.org>
[lucky@maintainer.example.org: struct foo moved from foo.c to foo.h]
Signed-off-by: Lucky K Maintainer <lucky@maintainer.example.org>
which is explicitly described as being to avoid "mak[ing] him endorse your bugs". It doesn't come up very often, though, since most issues get resolved fine by patch ping-pong.
Meanwhile, for your case (2) I think Suggested-By: is more appropriate than Reported-By: if your patch really is a rework of the contribution rather than just a new patch to fix the same bug.
Posted Jul 5, 2018 19:21 UTC (Thu)
by xtifr (guest, #143)
[Link]
If you give them *exclusive* credit when the work isn't exclusively theirs, sure. But there shouldn't be a problem with giving *all* the authors credit if it's a collaborative work. In fact, that's so clearly the right thing to do that I'm surprised there's any question about it.
When someone sends me a patch and I end up reworking it, I have never considered *not* saying (at the very least): "based on work by so-and-so." Whether they end up on blame lists may depend on a variety of factors, depending on how much reworking was needed, but at the very least, I make sure the name ends up in commit messages and changelogs.
(Aside: I also don't care whether upstream takes my patches directly or rewrites them. The important thing to me is that the problem is fixed. I do, of course, like getting some appropriate amount of credit for my help, but unless it's a project where I have plans to get more involved, I don't necessarily *want* to have to jump through the hoops of learning all the project's coding standards.)
Kindness and open-source projects