Sponsored by: in commit messages

[Ian Lepore]

On Thu, 2018-10-11 at 17:52 +0200, Stefan Bethke wrote:
> Hi there,
> 
> I just had another update to a port that I maintain committed. Thanks
> for that!
> 
> However, the commit message contains a Sponsored by line. I'm not
> sponsored by that company, and neither is the upstream project,
> AFAICT.
> 
> What is the significance of this line?
> 
> The port update was mainly mechanical, although it included adding a
> vuxml entry. At any rate, the submission contained a more specifc
> entry for vuxml than what got committed. So I'm wondering what the
> sponsoring actually entails.
> 
> From what I have observed over the years, Sponsored by has often
> indicated significant contributions to important subsystems. Is this
> impression misguided? Does it simply indicate that the committer
> working on that commit on sponsored time, no matter the amount of
> work?
> 
> 
> Stefan
> 

My guess would be that the committer does much of their work for a
company or organization and has customized a local commit-message
template to include the sponsor line automatically.

-- Ian