Re: [gentoo-project] Call for agenda items - Council meeting 2019-01-13

[Ulrich Mueller]

>>>>> On Wed, 02 Jan 2019, Robin H Johnson wrote:

>> The simplified form of the copyright attribution according to
>> GLEP 76 [2], i.e., "Copyright YEARS Gentoo Authors", SHALL [3]
>> be used for ebuilds and profile files in the Gentoo repository.

> For the record, can you clarify what attribution should be used for
> the following files in the Gentoo repository?
> - eclasses
> - init files & other scripts

The rationale for omitting them from the policy was already discussed
in the 20181014 council meeting [1]. In a nutshell, many eclasses have
explicit author lists even now, and there is less copying of code
between eclasses (or between scripts). So tracking of the main
contributor isn't as problematic as it is for ebuilds.

Still, using "Gentoo Authors" for these files as well is perfectly fine
and should be the default.

> - patches (written by a Gentoo developer vs external contributor)

Any attribution mentioned in GLEP 76 is fine, i.e., no special policy
for patches.

> As a specific case, if a new package is submitted with an openrc init
> script written by the contributor, and they have their name in it;
> should that remain intact (and what should be done later when modifying
> that file).

Keep the copyright line intact, and add "and others" when the file is
significantly modified.

(Still I think that the simplified attribution should be preferred,
especially for small files like init scripts which are barely
copyrightable.)

Ulrich

[1] https://projects.gentoo.org/council/meeting-logs/20181014.txt (at 20:14)