Dear Scott, Wolfgang,
On Tue, Jul 21, 2009 at 02:02:43PM -0400, Scott McNutt wrote:
... for a two line bug fix?
This is hardly a valid reason to claim copyright on the module.
This practice will only discourage the contribution of original work to the project. Nobody wants to have their work hijacked in such a manner.
So you really think your practice will encourage anybody to submit a clean patch for a bug he spent days (or weeks) to find?
I found it very difficult to supply a clean patch for some of the fixes or improvements I did for my private coldfire tree. For few of them, I sent bug reports with the part to fix - but I am not even sure if they finally got picked up by the maintainer.
On the one hand, you want patches to be tested (which is a good thing, of course), on the other hand I can not test a patch without other things changed for my board (which is not really useful for inclusion in the official tree, I think). Keeping several trees up-to-date to test the patches out of the vanilla tree and then rolling them back into the vanilly tree is at least beyond my time scale (and, to be honest, sometimes my knowledge of git, which is not self-explanatory at all).
I can understand the maintainers have not that much time, I can also understand that the original work has to get its due credit - but then those sending patches should get their credit, too, or else the maintainer has to do the work of integrating the fix himself.
Just my 2C, of course...
Regards, Wolfgang