Proper attribution of patches

Eric Anholt eta@lclark.edu
Tue Dec 23 20:45:00 GMT 2003


On Tue, 2003-12-23 at 11:32, Thomas Dickey wrote:
> On Tue, 23 Dec 2003, Harold L Hunt II wrote:
> 
> > XFree86 should be taking care not to steal credit for our patches by
> > committing them without proper attribution.
> 
> your standards are inconsistent: your committing the change rather than
> offering commit access to someone who solved a problem that (according
> to the email thread) that had stopped you for some _months_ indicates
> that your whole aim on this is to get credit for yourself.
> 
> I noted that the comment in the code was properly attributed, no further
> action was needed.

I see only minor inconsitency on his part, that the original commit of
that code didn't attribute it to its author in the CVS logs, while at
least some other commits do note authors of patches.  However, he didn't
explicitly take credit for it, like you did in the ChangeLog, and his
announcement of new packages with those changes reflects the author
correctly.  I don't see Harold Hunt asking for his name to be on the
patch in any way, only the patch's author's name (the "members of the
Cygwin/X community" in the original mail).

The only responsible thing for you to do would be to correct the
ChangeLog to attribute it to the patch's author.

-- 
Eric Anholt                                eta@lclark.edu          
http://people.freebsd.org/~anholt/         anholt@FreeBSD.org




More information about the Cygwin-xfree mailing list