Re: Removing in-source contribution records contributer

Heinrich Schuchardt
2025-05-09T14:18:50Z

Am 9. Mai 2025 14:54:31 MESZ schrieb Alejandro Colomar <alx@kernel.org>:
>Hi all,
>
>I've added to BCC everyone whose copyright notices have been removed
>(those that noted an email). The full thread for this discussion can be
>found here:
><https://lore.kernel.org/linux-man/jpin2dbnp5vpitnh7l4qmvkamzq3h3xljzsznrudgioox3nn72@57uybxbe3h4p/T/#u>
>
>Please let me know if it's okay to you to transform your copyright
>notices to make them uniform? That is, do you approve
><https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/docs/man-pages/man-pages.git/commit/?id=9f2986c34166085225bb5606ebfd4952054e1657>
>in what affects you?

Fine for me.

Best regards

Heinrich

>
>I've generated the BCC with
>
> $ git show 9f2986c34166085225bb5606ebfd4952054e1657 -- man \
> | grep '^-[^-]' \
> | grep @ \
> | grep -o '[^ ]*@[^ ]*' \
> | sed 's/,//g' \
> | sed 's/\.$//' \
> | sed 's/.*(//' \
> | sed 's/<//' \
> | sed 's/>//' \
> | sed 's/\.)//' \
> | sed 's/)//' \
> | sort \
> | uniq \
> | sed 's/^/Bcc: /';
>
>
>Have a lovely day!
>Alex
>
>On Tue, Apr 08, 2025 at 11:28:29PM +0200, Alejandro Colomar wrote:
>> Hi Carlos,
>>
>> On Tue, Apr 08, 2025 at 04:18:35PM -0400, Carlos O'Donell wrote:
>> > On 4/8/25 8:42 AM, G. Branden Robinson wrote:
>> > > Hi Alex,
>> > >
>> > > At 2025-04-08T01:05:02+0200, Alejandro Colomar wrote:
>> > > > On Thu, Feb 13, 2025 at 12:20:58AM +0100, Alejandro Colomar wrote:
>> > > > > On Wed, Feb 12, 2025 at 05:02:10PM -0600, G. Branden Robinson wrote:
>> > > > > > If you do this, I suggest you replace these lines with something
>> > > > > > like:
>> > > > > >
>> > > > > > .\" See the Git revision history at
>> > > > > > .\" $URL
>> > > > > > .\" for records of changes and contributors to this file.
>> > > > >
>> > > > > Good idea.
>> > > >
>> > > > I'm thinking I won't do that. I don't want to add that overhead to
>> > > > each page. People interested in the history of a page will already
>> > > > have a look at the git history, and there they'll find the old states
>> > > > of a page, in which they'll find this information.
>> > > >
>> > > > And it would require some non-trivial work to add this note
>> > > > consistently. I'll go with a removal without replacement, I think.
>> > >
>> > > Acknowledged. It's been a whole 7 weeks for so, so I don't clearly
>> > > remember my reasoning from February, but my suggestion may have been at
>> > > attempt to find a "conservative" alteration to file content or the
>> > > expressed meaning of the comments.
>> > >
>> > > But, what's conservative in one dimension often is not in another, such
>> > > as "labor required".
>> > >
>> > > I also agree that while Git is a complex suite of tools, "git log" is
>> > > not among its deeper magicks. At least not when run without arguments.
>> >
>> > We did something similar in glibc and created a CONTRIBUTED-BY file at the
>> > top-level and moved all contribution lines out of the respective
>> > files into the top-level file.
>>
>> Yep, a CREDITS file would be interesting. I wouldn't keep info about
>> which specific files were written by each contributor. That seems
>> something more appripriate for git-log(1). The pre-git contributions
>> will be visible in old versions of the pages (i.e., if one sees
>> Jane Random Developer in CREDITS and wonders which pages she contributed
>> to, they can `git log -S 'Jane Random Developer'` and similar commands
>> to find out.
>>
>> Thanks!
>>
>>
>> Have a lovely night!
>> Alex
>>
>> >
>> > e.g.
>> > ~~~
>> > The glibc project stopped adding "Contributed by" lines to source files in 2012
>> > in favour of acknowledging contributors in the glibc manual and through the git
>> > log. The record of existing "Contributed by" lines have now been moved to this
>> > file to acknowledge contributions by these developers to glibc.
>> >
>> > argp/argp-test.c:
>> > Written by Miles Bader <miles@gnu.ai.mit.edu>.
>> >
>> > argp/tst-argp1.c:
>> > Contributed by Ulrich Drepper <drepper@redhat.com>, 2002.
>> > ...
>> > ~~~
>> > The top-level CONTRIBUTED-BY has ~3,000 Contributed/Written by lines.
>> >
>> > Sme of the authors predated the use of git and so it was simpler to keep the
>> > lines somewhere as part of the transition away from "Contributed by"-style
>> > lines.
>> >
>> > --
>> > Cheers,
>> > Carlos.
>> >
>> >
>>
>> --
>> <https://www.alejandro-colomar.es/>
>
>
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