Practice of "Sponsored by" in commit messages
John W. O'Brien
john at saltant.com
Thu May 17 23:29:38 UTC 2018
On 2018/05/17 19:18, Maxim Sobolev wrote:
> John, no, not really, sorry. Work is done, credit is given. The form and
> amount of this credit is between whoever does the work and whoever is
> being credited. I don't see why is there any third-party to be involved
> in governing whether or not this credit is "appropriate", "sufficient"
> or "all encompassing" for the work in question. This is just a credit,
> it does not affect the quality of work, nor the license (which is
> 2-clause BSD) nor the copyright holder. Three things that really matter
> long-time. So "Sponsored by" it's just the message on the t-shirt,
> having only meaning to whoever produces the piece and whoever wears it,
> but nothing in particular to the outside world. IMHO.
I fear that you and I are still not on the same page. The difference
between a t-shirt and a commit message is that two or three or four
people can all do work on the same commit, but only one person can wear
a t-shirt.
Taking the analogy further, if you hang a t-shirt with your employer's
logo on a piece of work that you and I collaborated to produce, don't
you think my employer might feel slighted? What if I had done 80% of the
work?
> On Thu, May 17, 2018 at 3:43 PM, John W. O'Brien <john at saltant.com
> <mailto:john at saltant.com>> wrote:
>
> 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>
> > <mailto: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
> <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:
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