Preferred form for making modifications

Posted Nov 17, 2018 21:21 UTC (Sat) by matthias (subscriber, #94967)
In reply to: Preferred form for making modifications by Otus
Parent article: Bringing the Android kernel back to the mainline

E-Mail correspondence between developers could also help in understanding the source code. Are you also unsure whether it is OK to strip those before distribution? Git commit messages are clearly metadata. If it would be required to distribute metadata, this would have to be explicitly mentioned in the GPL.

Preferred form for making modifications

Posted Nov 17, 2018 21:39 UTC (Sat) by Otus (subscriber, #67685) [Link] (2 responses)

I meant I'm not sure if stripping comments from source is ok.

Removing git history is clearly at least tolerated.

Preferred form for making modifications

Posted Nov 17, 2018 21:56 UTC (Sat) by matthias (subscriber, #94967) [Link] (1 responses)

Ah ok. I actually also wondered whether it is ok to strip comments. I am also not sure. For git I am sure that stripping it is perfectly ok. They are definitely not part of the code itself. For comments this can be argued in both directions. From the point of the compiler they are also not part of the code. That is why they are called comments. From the point of the programmer this might look different. Of course, if the added code is without comments there is always the problem to prove that they were removed, i.e., that the code was commented before publication.

Preferred form for making modifications

Posted Nov 19, 2018 18:12 UTC (Mon) by jezuch (subscriber, #52988) [Link]

...assuming of course that the comments are worth anything. I've seen too many repositoe6 where the commit comments were of the variety "today's work" or "implement this" or something like that. It just makes you want to hurt the authors ;)