Preferred form for making modifications

Posted Nov 17, 2018 23:49 UTC (Sat) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330)
In reply to: Preferred form for making modifications by pallas
Parent article: Bringing the Android kernel back to the mainline

The GPL (2 or 3) does not impose an obligation to give people all of the stupid ideas and mistakes that occurred during internal development, or the references to company confidential information that might have appeared in comments but were scrubbed before release, all of which would be exposed by providing the complete git repository. The obligation is to provide source that corresponds to the binary that it shipped, and not more than that.

Preferred form for making modifications

Posted Nov 19, 2018 4:29 UTC (Mon) by jeffm (subscriber, #29341) [Link]

That's a lot of words to obfuscate the value of a release branch.

Preferred form for making modifications

Posted Nov 19, 2018 20:47 UTC (Mon) by tao (subscriber, #17563) [Link]

You are also obliged to make note of any modifications you have made (no requirements for changelogs though) and when you made them.

"You must cause the modified files to carry prominent notices stating that you changed the files and the date of any change."

The best way to do this *is* typically to provide a changelog entry, but if you just distribute patches that should be enough; after all patches by their very nature show what files are modified, and assuming that the patch was created when the modification was made, it'll also have the time of change in the patch header.