[musl] Authorship/attribution and stalled patches

[musl] Authorship/attribution and stalled patches

[Rich Felker]

It came to my attention that there are a few patches in limbo where,
after some discussion, it seems I was waiting for an updated patch
from the contributor to apply, and it never appeared. I could and
should just make the changes myself (this would have been more
efficient to begin with), but I'm not sure what to do about
authorship/attribution in that situation, and it probably deserves
community input.

A while back, I started trying to make better use of git commit
authorship to credit contributors, rather than just mentioning "patch
by X" or "based on patch/idea by X" in commit messages. However I
still don't have a clear feel for how this should work in the case
where the patch is modified before being applied. Are there
established norms for the degree to which a patch should be modified
while leaving the author intact, or should it just always be converted
to commit authorship by the person who makes the final changes, with
original author in the description? It's really a tradeoff between
potential misattribution of mistakes or changes the original author
might not like, and failure to credit, and I don't know where the
right balance is.

Rich

Re: [musl] Authorship/attribution and stalled patches

[Rich Felker]

On Sun, Nov 01, 2020 at 08:16:32PM -0500, Rich Felker wrote:
> It came to my attention that there are a few patches in limbo where,
> after some discussion, it seems I was waiting for an updated patch
> from the contributor to apply, and it never appeared. I could and
> should just make the changes myself (this would have been more
> efficient to begin with), but I'm not sure what to do about
> authorship/attribution in that situation, and it probably deserves
> community input.
> 
> A while back, I started trying to make better use of git commit
> authorship to credit contributors, rather than just mentioning "patch
> by X" or "based on patch/idea by X" in commit messages. However I
> still don't have a clear feel for how this should work in the case
> where the patch is modified before being applied. Are there
> established norms for the degree to which a patch should be modified
> while leaving the author intact, or should it just always be converted
> to commit authorship by the person who makes the final changes, with
> original author in the description? It's really a tradeoff between
> potential misattribution of mistakes or changes the original author
> might not like, and failure to credit, and I don't know where the
> right balance is.

A further special case of this is where the content of the diff is
fine, but the commit message needs significant rewording to be
acceptable (e.g. the original only explains a what rather than a why,
or includes a why that's not the actual reason the patch is needed).

For other cases mentioned in the quoted text above, the
Co-authored-by: pseudo-header popularized by Github seems to be a
reasonable solution. But I don't feel it's appropriate to relegate
someone to a "co-author" when the entire diff (or even 99% of it) is
by them and it's just the commit message that was rewritten. (Ideally,
git's data model would have separate authorship for commit message and
diff, and I don't think existing committer field in the model is
interpreted that way.)

Rich

Re: [musl] Authorship/attribution and stalled patches

[Markus Wichmann]

On Sun, Nov 01, 2020 at 08:16:32PM -0500, Rich Felker wrote:
> It came to my attention that there are a few patches in limbo where,
> after some discussion, it seems I was waiting for an updated patch
> from the contributor to apply, and it never appeared. I could and
> should just make the changes myself (this would have been more
> efficient to begin with), but I'm not sure what to do about
> authorship/attribution in that situation, and it probably deserves
> community input.
>
> A while back, I started trying to make better use of git commit
> authorship to credit contributors, rather than just mentioning "patch
> by X" or "based on patch/idea by X" in commit messages. However I
> still don't have a clear feel for how this should work in the case
> where the patch is modified before being applied. Are there
> established norms for the degree to which a patch should be modified
> while leaving the author intact, or should it just always be converted
> to commit authorship by the person who makes the final changes, with
> original author in the description? It's really a tradeoff between
> potential misattribution of mistakes or changes the original author
> might not like, and failure to credit, and I don't know where the
> right balance is.
>
> Rich

Why not just apply the patch as-is (leaving the patch author as
committer), then commit the necessary changes afterwards (as yourself)?
That way the original patch becomes its own commit, and we can see what
had to be changed afterwards. If you want to make it extraordinarily
clean, you could do all of that on a branch and merge the product
afterwards. Seems to be the cleanest solution. If the patch is not yet
in a form where the fixes are obvious (e.g. the reallocarray() patch we
had a while back that either would give you horrible performance or
copies of sensitive data lying around in address space), then the patch
is probably not ripe, anyway.

Ciao,
Markus

Re: [musl] Authorship/attribution and stalled patches

[Rich Felker]

On Mon, Nov 02, 2020 at 08:40:28PM +0100, Markus Wichmann wrote:
> On Sun, Nov 01, 2020 at 08:16:32PM -0500, Rich Felker wrote:
> > It came to my attention that there are a few patches in limbo where,
> > after some discussion, it seems I was waiting for an updated patch
> > from the contributor to apply, and it never appeared. I could and
> > should just make the changes myself (this would have been more
> > efficient to begin with), but I'm not sure what to do about
> > authorship/attribution in that situation, and it probably deserves
> > community input.
> >
> > A while back, I started trying to make better use of git commit
> > authorship to credit contributors, rather than just mentioning "patch
> > by X" or "based on patch/idea by X" in commit messages. However I
> > still don't have a clear feel for how this should work in the case
> > where the patch is modified before being applied. Are there
> > established norms for the degree to which a patch should be modified
> > while leaving the author intact, or should it just always be converted
> > to commit authorship by the person who makes the final changes, with
> > original author in the description? It's really a tradeoff between
> > potential misattribution of mistakes or changes the original author
> > might not like, and failure to credit, and I don't know where the
> > right balance is.
> >
> > Rich
> 
> Why not just apply the patch as-is (leaving the patch author as
> committer), then commit the necessary changes afterwards (as yourself)?
> That way the original patch becomes its own commit, and we can see what
> had to be changed afterwards. If you want to make it extraordinarily
> clean, you could do all of that on a branch and merge the product
> afterwards. Seems to be the cleanest solution. If the patch is not yet
> in a form where the fixes are obvious (e.g. the reallocarray() patch we
> had a while back that either would give you horrible performance or
> copies of sensitive data lying around in address space), then the patch
> is probably not ripe, anyway.

This would be a major regression in maintainership quality. It
introduces versions that don't work/have new bugs that would not
otherwise be in the history, making it harder to bisect, harder for
patches to commute (and be backported etc.), harder to read and
understand, etc. The intent of the history is to be a history is
approved changes, with clearly documented motivations for each.

Rich

Re: [musl] Authorship/attribution and stalled patches

[Wolf]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 1191 bytes --]

Hello,

On 2020-11-02 14:45:58 -0500, Rich Felker wrote:
> This would be a major regression in maintainership quality. It
> introduces versions that don't work/have new bugs that would not
> otherwise be in the history, making it harder to bisect, harder for
> patches to commute (and be backported etc.), harder to read and
> understand, etc. The intent of the history is to be a history is
> approved changes, with clearly documented motivations for each.

My opinion on this is that for

1. Commit message only changes

Just rewrite the commit message and add note at the bottom along the
lines that "Commit message by Rich" or something like that. And leave
original author.

2. Changes in the patch itself

This I think calls for common sense approach, based on how large the
changes are. Same approach in as 1., in case of small changes add
something like "Slightly modified by Rich", in case of large(r) rewrite
"Based on patch by AUTHOR".



If the end goal is to merge those stale patches, I think this is best
that can be done.

W.

-- 
There are only two hard things in Computer Science:
cache invalidation, naming things and off-by-one errors.

[-- Attachment #2: signature.asc --]
[-- Type: application/pgp-signature, Size: 833 bytes --]