#1429 PR merged: Replace AUTHORS by MAINTAINERS file and explain more background info¶
Labels: enhancement, documentation, cleanup,
fixed / solved / done
schlomo opened issue at 2017-07-24 18:25:¶
about the many contributors who helped ReaR. Fixes #1427
For minor changes please simply push to this branch. For bigger ones let me know and I'll do the work.
I'll ask everybody to review. If I don't hear from you within a couple of days/weeks then I assume that you consent to this change.
jsmeix commented at 2017-07-25 09:24:¶
I wonder if it is legally (i.e. according to the GPL)
sufficient to have the authors and contributors
(I think in GPL wording all relevant contributors
are legally same as authors) only mentioned indirectly
via an external link as in
To see the full list of authors and their contributions please look at https://github.com/rear/rear/graphs/contributors
Perhaps we must provide a list of the authors in a source file?
Perhaps we can leave out the e-mail addresses of the authors?
Or does a git repository count as sources for the GPL?
I.e. what one gets via
git clone https://github.com/rear/rear.git
because that contains all authors and their contributions
in the git log - but a special tool 'git' is needed here
to "pull out" the authors and their contributions.
schlomo commented at 2017-07-25 09:30:¶
@jsmeix I share your concern. It seems that the FSF serves as some kind of a copyright proxy (https://www.gnu.org/prep/maintain/html_node/Copyright-Papers.html), but the process seems quite cumbersome on first reading. Can you maybe ask the specialists at SUSE for some practical advise?
jsmeix commented at 2017-07-25 10:04:¶
@schlomo
I will ask them but from my (outsider) experience
often a lawyer cannot provide concrete practical advise
because (as far as I understand it) license issues are
often complicated without matching court decisions
so that often "it depends..."
jsmeix commented at 2017-07-26 08:59:¶
The currently proposed MAINTAINERS file
https://github.com/rear/rear/blob/93e544a258ff184d09b94a5c7128380a488b3227/MAINTAINERS
lists Dag Wieers and Jeroen Hoekx
but as far as I see they do no longer actively maintain ReaR.
I think the MAINTAINERS file is meant to list
those who currently actively maintain ReaR.
I think a MAINTAINERS file is not meant to list all
contributors which is what an AUTHORS file is meant to do.
Accordingly I think when Dag Wieers and Jeroen Hoekx
really do no longer actively maintain ReaR, then they
should no longer be not listed in the MAINTAINERS file.
Alternatively the MAINTAINERS file could have separated
sections to distinguish currently active maintainers
from no longer active maintainers.
E.g. something as the "Alumni" section in the exhaustive and
explanatory
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/moby/moby/master/MAINTAINERS
but probably much shorter for what ReaR actually needs.
schlomo commented at 2017-07-26 09:00:¶
I'll ask them
dagwieers commented at 2017-08-23 16:22:¶
BTW I noticed that I still have merge rights on this repository. This probably dates back from the time we moved to Github. (Which I think was the best decision we could have made ;-))
You may want to restrict my "write" access (and probably @jhoekx too) for security purposes. It would still be nice to stay as a member of the project though.
And when there is a need to have commit/merge rights again, I'm sure we can enable it again at that time.
schlomo commented at 2017-09-24 13:15:¶
@jsmeix I know that this is not perfect, I hope that this is a step into the right direction.
jsmeix commented at 2017-09-25 08:27:¶
@schlomo
for me it is "sufficiently perfect" 👍 cf.
https://github.com/rear/rear/pull/1429#pullrequestreview-52004087
Many thanks for it!
[Export of Github issue for rear/rear.]