Proper attribution of patches

Harold L Hunt II huntharo@msu.edu
Tue Dec 23 19:41:00 GMT 2003


Thomas Dickey wrote:

> On Tue, 23 Dec 2003, Harold L Hunt II wrote:
> 
> 
>>The following CVS commit, made by Thomas Dickey, has no indication that
>>Thomas was either a) not involved at all in the patch or b) that Thomas
>>found Ralf Habacker's patch and committed a modified version of that patch.
>>
>>The CVS log message says:
>>     fixes for _XtInherit on cygwin.
>>
>>The hw/xfree86/CHANGELOG files says:
>>      XFree86 4.3.99.903 (xx December 2003)
>>      + 699. Fixes to build/run on cygwin (Thomas Dickey).
>>
>>I know that this patch was based at least in part (if not entirely) on
>>Ralf Habacker's patch for the same, since it includes a more than twenty
>>line comment from Ralf along with his name at the bottom:
>>
>>http://cvsweb.xfree86.org/cvsweb/xc/lib/Xt/Initialize.c.diff?r1=3.21&r2=3.22&f=h
> 
> 
> I'm aware of that.
> 
> Your commit didn't mention this either.

Our change log is in our release notes, where the changes were 
attributed to Ralf Habacker:

http://sources.redhat.com/ml/cygwin-xfree-announce/2003-10/msg00008.html

> Do you have point?

XFree86 should be taking care not to steal credit for our patches by 
committing them without proper attribution.

Harold Hunt



More information about the Cygwin-xfree mailing list