Re: Removing in-source contribution records contributer

Mathieu Desnoyers
2025-05-09T13:05:15Z

On 2025-05-09 08:54, Alejandro Colomar wrote:
> 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?

I was not sure if I should reply to all (including the mailing list).
Please clarify for others.

This change is OK as far as I am concerned. I'm always happy to
help lessen the maintenance burden. Eliminating redundant,
copyright information appears to be a good way to it.

The git history holds detailed information about the
line-by-line modifications to each file anyway.

Thanks,

Mathieu

>
> 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/>
>
>
>

--
Mathieu Desnoyers
EfficiOS Inc.