Re: MODULE_MAINTAINER

[Rene Herman <rene.herman@gmail.com>]

On 04/04/2007 06:38 PM, Rene Herman wrote:

Rusty?

> On 04/04/2007 06:00 PM, Alan Cox wrote:
> 
>>> Given that people seem to agree that authorship information has no 
>>> place in the binary, that might actually be best.
>>
>> Authorship information is very useful in the binary, especially when you
>> have to get lawyers involved in explaining things to people.
> 
> Okay.
> 
>>> So, MODULE_AUTHOR be gone?
>>
>> Not if I have anything to do with it. Putting maintainer in is not a
>> bad idea but that assumes it gets maintained, the beauty of _AUTHOR
>> is that it's generally right and stays that way or approximately so.
> 
> Case in point; someone is working with me in private on a new "mitsumi" 
> legacy CD-ROM driver. He's authoring the actual driver and upto now I've 
> just been doing some peripheral module infrastructure work. Given that I 
> have the hardware to test the thing, I'll be the maintainer though.
> 
> Adding myself as a MODULE_AUTHOR would be largely incorrect and adding 
> myself as the _only_ MODULE_AUTHOR would be so factually incorrect I 
> wouldn't, even if only from a credits point of view. Yet I do want to 
> make sure people contact me, and not the MODULE_AUTHOR (which will 
> happen no matter the MAINTAINERS file).
> 
> Other cases-in-point; I've lately been rummaging through sound/isa a 
> bit. Nothing much copyrightable again but especially in those situations 
> where (some of the) original authors are no longer active, I do again 
> want people to contact me about them if needed. And all the "which one 
> of the three people listed here is maintaining this" is yet another.
> 
> MODULE_AUTHOR may be approximately right but especially with old drivers 
> it also has little relation with who's maintaining the thing.
> 
> If MODULE_AUTHOR stays, can I just have MODULE_MAINTAINER please? It 
> doesn't need to be added to drivers directly, it can just grow (and 
> being inside the code, I suppose it'll likely stay up to date better 
> than the MAINTAINERS file).

Rene.