Brian Nelson wrote:
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.
I would say that when someone submits a patch, they should expect that just the patch is going to be applied. If they want attribution then the submitted patch should take care of it[ie patch the copyright statement at the top of the file to include their name or add their name in a comment to the new code]. Failure to do so implicitly states that they agree with the present license of the code and don't want to be acknowledged. Though, of course, that is just my un-informed opinion.
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