Gentoo Archives: gentoo-project

From: William Hubbs <williamh@g.o>
To: gentoo-project@l.g.o
Cc: chutzpah@g.o, rich0@g.o
Subject: Re: [gentoo-project] rfc: copyright attribution clarifications
Date: Thu, 15 Nov 2018 15:28:13
Message-Id: 20181115152808.GA18539@linux1.home
In Reply to: Re: [gentoo-project] rfc: copyright attribution clarifications by Rich Freeman
1 On Thu, Nov 15, 2018 at 07:03:11AM -0800, Rich Freeman wrote:
2 > On Wed, Nov 14, 2018 at 4:00 PM Patrick McLean <chutzpah@g.o> wrote:
3 > > Personally, I don't see why there is a strong objection to a practice that is quite common in open source code.
4 >
5 > I suspect that some of this is due to the nature of ebuilds themselves
6 > and our workflow.
7 >
8 > If you have some file full of 2000 lines of source code, you're going
9 > to spend all your time buried in whatever function you're refactoring
10 > and you're not really looking at the boilerplate at the start of the
11 > file. You might spend days looking at the file and your editor
12 > remembers where you left off. You never even look at the copyright
13 > notices and a few more lines isn't a big deal. You don't even look at
14 > the other functions in the file you're editing but trust them to honor
15 > their APIs.
16 >
17 > On the other hand Gentoo ebuilds might only be 10-20 lines long, and a
18 > lot of the stuff that people are often looking at (keywords, iuse,
19 > my_foo, etc) are right at the top. Often this stuff is "above the
20 > fold" as they say. Sticking another half a dozen lines of cruft at
21 > the top means that you're hunting more to find the stuff you care
22 > about, and the copyright boilerplate could become half the file
23 > contents in a file that is mostly boilerplate already.
24
25 You can use searches in your editor to get to where you need to go quickly,
26 so the size of the file really shouldn't matter too much.
27
28 I believe there are also plugins that can hide things like this from you
29 visually so you don't see them.
30
31 William

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