<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/strict.dtd"><html><head><meta name="qrichtext" content="1" /><style type="text/css">p, li { white-space: pre-wrap; }</style></head><body style=" font-family:'Consolas'; font-size:11pt; font-weight:400; font-style:normal;">On Wednesday 23 July 2008, Friedrich W. H. Kossebau wrote:<br>
> I am especially interested how accountability (or what the term is) will be<br>
> treated if some code is developed off the central repository system. With<br>
> the current central system every commit is bound to one account, checked by<br>
> password. But how to handle the merge of a branch in another repository<br>
> with perhaps local accounts, not given by the KDE admins? How should<br>
> copyright assignment be handled? BTW, doesn't the same problem already<br>
> arise with subversion today when svnmerge is used, as done e.g. in the<br>
> merging of the PIM enterprise branch, which are commited by one person and<br>
> have no clear authorship (thus copyright ownership) registered with the<br>
> system, IIUC. Is this alright?<br>
<p style="-qt-paragraph-type:empty; margin-top:0px; margin-bottom:0px; margin-left:0px; margin-right:0px; -qt-block-indent:0; text-indent:0px; -qt-user-state:0;"></p>The Linux kernel hackers have various tags they add to their emails and patches (i.e. Signed-off-by: foo@kernel.org) which is the mechanism they use to handle this. I admit that it appeals to the military officer type in me. In my branch even routine reports get reviewed through the chain of command from originator to a supervising officer (at least the appropriate Department Head but quite often all the way to the Commanding Officer).<br>
<p style="-qt-paragraph-type:empty; margin-top:0px; margin-bottom:0px; margin-left:0px; margin-right:0px; -qt-block-indent:0; text-indent:0px; -qt-user-state:0;"></p>The question as I see it is: Are we required to track this kind of information? If not, should we?<br>
<p style="-qt-paragraph-type:empty; margin-top:0px; margin-bottom:0px; margin-left:0px; margin-right:0px; -qt-block-indent:0; text-indent:0px; -qt-user-state:0;"></p>Then if we must track it, how do we do so? I would of course prefer that however it is done, it is as foolproof as possible. So I don't know if manually adding tags to the commit log (like AUTHOR:foo@kdemail.net) is the best, I think making it part of the command itself would be better (i.e. bzr commit-for --author blah).<br>
<p style="-qt-paragraph-type:empty; margin-top:0px; margin-bottom:0px; margin-left:0px; margin-right:0px; -qt-block-indent:0; text-indent:0px; -qt-user-state:0;"></p>Really though a lot of this has nothing to do with DVCS per se, we already commit patches to the repository from new contributors with no account (and take care of the attribution in a human-readable way in the commit log). So I don't see this as a big issue yet, unless there's a legal reason to be more proactive.<br>
<p style="-qt-paragraph-type:empty; margin-top:0px; margin-bottom:0px; margin-left:0px; margin-right:0px; -qt-block-indent:0; text-indent:0px; -qt-user-state:0;"></p>Regards,<br>
- Michael Pyne</p></body></html>