On 15/5/18 7:40 am, John W. O'Brien wrote:
Hello FreeBSD Ports,
The Committer's Guide section on Commit Log Messages [0], doesn't cover
the use of the "Sponsored by" key word. As a non-committer contributor,
it only recently occurred to me to wonder what work that credit is
intended to represent, and whether some light definition would be
helpful to reduce ambiguity.
When a committer credits a sponsor of theirs, from which the contributor
received no sponsorship, the portrayal feels a little awkward. Does this
strike the list as a problem, and if so, how ought it be solved?
To make this concrete, allow me to illustrate the situation.
Alice, working on her own time, prepares and contributes a patch. Bob,
who works for Acme Corp, reviews and commits the patch on company time.
The commit message includes "Sponsored by: Acme Corp". Alice eagerly
awaits her check from Acme Corp. Should the commit message have read
"Sponsored by: Acme Corp (Bob)"?
Probably not for just a review, unless it was pretty in depth and took
many hours.
However we want to give some sort of acknowledgement
to companies that do allow their work to be incorporated, and who allow
their employees to do some FreeBSD work as part of their duties.
It also makes their name familiar to the readers of the commit emails
and often results in others seeking work there etc.
"Sponsored by:" generally means "some (maybe small) part of this
work was developed
by someone being paid". It does not specify how much, and it is
generally left to the committer
to decide if it was meaningful. In some cases it is deliberately NOT
entered despite
the developer being paid. (e.g. when a company is in stealth mode, or
when some political
issue is relevant and people don't want to draw attention).
This could be extensible to multiple sponsorships. If, instead, Alice
prepares the patch having received a grant to do so from Best Sys Dev,
the commit message could state "Sponsored by: Acme Corp (Bob), Best Sys
Dev (Alice)".
[0]
https://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/articles/committers-guide/article.html#commit-log-message
PS: I realize that this issue transcends ports, but it's not clear where
I should send this instead, and this list seems like it would have a
reasonably high concentration of people with a stake in the discussion.
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