Re: [gentoo-project] Call for agenda items - Council meeting 2018-10-14

[Ulrich Mueller]

>>>>> On Thu, 11 Oct 2018, Brian Dolbec wrote:

> My employer sponsors a lot of Gentoo ebuild and project work.  We are
> currently waiting for approval from the legal department to be able to
> continue after the Glep 76 approval and subsequent enforcement.  It
> very well may include a requirement to include a company copyright
> notice for the work done on comapny time and equipment.

> I have prepared a patch to repoman which fully implements Glep 76. [1]
> It adds a COPYRIGHT_OWNER variable to make.conf which can be set.
> The COPYRIGHT_OWNER is only ever ensured (possibly added) to the
> existing copyright line if the --copyright option is given on the cli.
> It is also used to generate a new copyright line if one did not exist.

As I've already commented in the pull request [1], I think this isn't
something that should be automated in a QA tool like repoman.

IMHO, repoman should accept both forms of the copyright notice, as long
as they're syntactically well-formed. Otherwise, it should leave the
copyright holder alone (with the possible exception of updating Gentoo
Foundation to Gentoo Authors).

> This option should only ever be used for significant changes to an
> ebuild.

Right, but I think there is the danger that the feature will be abused,
e.g. that people will use it also for non-copyrightable changes.

Also see my reply to bircoph's posting. The copyright notice has a
very specific purpose. It should neither be mistaken as an authors'
attribution, not should it be abused as a "scent mark".

> I could extend it to include a --others option to append the "and
> others" to the copyright. But I don't know if that will be used enough
> to justify the extra code.

> This patch also makes repoman more friendly for downstream repositiries
> which could set the copyright apropriately without manual editing.

> [1] https://github.com/gentoo/portage/pull/376