Practice of "Sponsored by" in commit messages

[John W. O'Brien]

On 2018/05/14 20:14, Maxim Sobolev wrote:
> What's wrong with a current practice. Why is it of any concern to you,
> John? Just curious that is not very clear from your message. It is like
> someone trying to moderate what people in general or some group in
> particular (e.g. freebsd committers) are allowed to put on their
> t-shirts just because you find it offensive or inappropriate.

I don't find crediting sponsors offensive nor inappropriate. Quite the
contrary. What I find problematic is when multiple people do work, not
all with sponsorship or the same sponsorship, and only one person's
sponsor is mentioned in a way that seems to imply that all the work was
sponsored.

What I'm proposing is not to end or ban the practice, but to improve and
refine it so that sponsors are credited for what they sponsor and not
for what they don't sponsor.

Is that clearer?

> On Mon, May 14, 2018, 4:40 PM John W. O'Brien <john at saltant.com
> <mailto:john at saltant.com>> wrote:
> 
>     Hello FreeBSD Ports,
> 
>     The Committer's Guide section on Commit Log Messages [0], doesn't cover
>     the use of the "Sponsored by" key word. As a non-committer contributor,
>     it only recently occurred to me to wonder what work that credit is
>     intended to represent, and whether some light definition would be
>     helpful to reduce ambiguity.
> 
>     When a committer credits a sponsor of theirs, from which the contributor
>     received no sponsorship, the portrayal feels a little awkward. Does this
>     strike the list as a problem, and if so, how ought it be solved?
> 
>     To make this concrete, allow me to illustrate the situation.
> 
>     Alice, working on her own time, prepares and contributes a patch. Bob,
>     who works for Acme Corp, reviews and commits the patch on company time.
>     The commit message includes "Sponsored by: Acme Corp". Alice eagerly
>     awaits her check from Acme Corp. Should the commit message have read
>     "Sponsored by: Acme Corp (Bob)"?
> 
>     This could be extensible to multiple sponsorships. If, instead, Alice
>     prepares the patch having received a grant to do so from Best Sys Dev,
>     the commit message could state "Sponsored by: Acme Corp (Bob), Best Sys
>     Dev (Alice)".
> 
>     [0]
>     https://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/articles/committers-guide/article.html#commit-log-message
> 
>     PS: I realize that this issue transcends ports, but it's not clear where
>     I should send this instead, and this list seems like it would have a
>     reasonably high concentration of people with a stake in the discussion.


-- 
John W. O'Brien
OpenPGP keys:
    0x33C4D64B895DBF3B

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