[gentoo-dev] non-Gentoo stuff in our CVS

[Donnie Berkholz]

I'd like to clarify our policy on what goes into Gentoo CVS. Right now,
we sort of have the old copyright stuff that says only Gentoo-owned
things in Gentoo CVS. But we've admitted it sucks and we're reworking
it.

We need an exception for source patches. I've got something like 75
patches to X right now, and maintaining them on my own computer or some
other version control system is silly. That's what Gentoo CVS should be
for -- maintaining parts of Gentoo.

Most packages in Gentoo aren't owned by Gentoo, and patches to those
packages shouldn't be an exception to that. Ownership should remain
either with the author of the patch or the package maintainer, not with
Gentoo. We have no business sticking our heads in there unless the patch
author specifically requests to turn ownership over to Gentoo.

This is problematic in two cases: (1) patches owned by people other than
the maintainer, and (2) patches owned by the maintainer. In the first
case, a dev would just be breaking the rules by adding those patches to
CVS -- copyright doesn't change just because we say it does. In the
second case, many devs signed an agreement already saying anything they
wrote and added to Gentoo CVS is Gentoo's. This needs to change for
patches. There should be no discrimination against a patch author --
whether Gentoo dev or not Gentoo dev, no copyright assignment should
happen.

If everyone agrees to this, we can start adding these to gentoo/src/ or
whatever other location makes sense. I'd guess at least X and kernel
people would be interested -- maybe others with large patchsets, such as
toolchain.

Making Gentoo maintainers keep their patches outside of Gentoo because
of an annoying technicality is simply ludicrous. It doesn't benefit
developers or users.

Thanks,
Donnie
-- 
Donnie Berkholz
Gentoo Linux


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