Re: Canonical list of contributors

[Brian Nelson <pyro@debian.org>]

Ben Pfaff <blp@cs.stanford.edu> writes:

> "Rob Taylor" <robtaylor@fastmail.fm> writes:
>
>> Is there no way we can automate this? My feeling is that everyone who has
>> a name on a changelog should be listed as a contributor. It would also be
>> nice to have some policy that says not listing a patch contributor in a
>> changelog is a serious bug.
>
> "serious"?  I don't see how it rates anything higher than
> "minor."  Not mentioning a patch contributor's name is "a problem
> which doesn't affect the package's usefulness, and is presumably
> trivial to fix," matching the BTS description of "minor."  It
> certainly doesn't warrant release-critical status, which
> "serious" would make it.  We always have enough bugs holding up
> release that we don't need to artificially create more.

For trivial patches, that's true.  But for more complex patches
(i.e. something copyrightable), not attributing the code to the
copyright holder is essentially plagiarism and is a violation of
copyright law (AIUI, please correct me if I'm wrong).  That is something
that definitely could be considered release-critical.

-- 
You win again, gravity!