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Re: debian/watch for gitorious



On Fri, Mar 08, 2013 at 09:51:26PM +0100, Ansgar Burchardt wrote:
> Adam Borowski <kilobyte@angband.pl> writes:
> > On Fri, Mar 08, 2013 at 10:54:58AM +0800, Paul Wise wrote:
> >> None of the C files contain copyright or license information, which is
> >> a good idea:
> >> 
> >> http://tieguy.org/blog/2012/03/17/on-the-importance-of-per-file-license-information/
> >
> > Please, don't!
> 
> Please do!
> 
> Having a header in each file makes reviewing license information much,
> much easier.

This might be the case only if that information has any semblance of
validity.  That's possible pretty much only for tiny projects with one or at
most few contributors.  In anything worth looking at, a single file will be
typically edited by tens of contributors at least, with changes touching
many files at once.

Another issue is, if code is borrowed from another project, it will usually
be included inside a file rather than being a whole file (unless we're
talking about embedded copies, which are bad for obvious reasons).  This
means you'd need to track contributions at line scope (or even character!)
rather than per-file.

So, you pay costs, for no gains.

If you really need to know how a piece of code ended up in the project, just
use version control.  It's reliable and complete, at least for modern
version control systems.  Version control is not centered on legal issues,
but in the worst case it will tell you at least who checked something in.


-- 
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