Re: Please ship changelogs in your tarballs

[Emmanuele Bassi <ebassi gmail com>]

On Sun, 2010-10-03 at 11:23 +0200, Josselin Mouette wrote:

> There should be no need to remind you that the GPL mandates a changelog
> or something similar to be present in all source distributions.

it's the NEWS file.

if you're referring to the 2.a clause in the GPLv2, i.e.:

"""
  2. You may modify your copy or copies of the Program or any portion
of it, thus forming a work based on the Program, and copy and
distribute such modifications or work under the terms of Section 1
above, provided that you also meet all of these conditions:

    a) You must cause the modified files to carry prominent notices
    stating that you changed the files and the date of any change.
"""

then the section is referring to the licensee, i.e. people
redistributing the program under the terms of the license, not the
original authors of the program itself; in this case, the Debian
developer applying distribution patches and thus modifying the copy of
the program.

obviously, IANAL, but the wording is pretty clear in this case.

since you brought up the legal issues I'd suggest you talk to a lawyer
to clarify this bit, because a lot of GPL-v2 licensed projects - within
and without the GNOME project - use ChangeLog entries like this:

  yyyy-mm-dd  email address

          *: Miscellaneous fixes to make everything work

and that I'm pretty sure does not *at all* conform to section 2.a of the
license.

*if*, on the other hand, you want a ChangeLog because it makes your life
as a packager easier (for some unknown reason) then you should probably
ask for a Gnome Goal to add the autogeneration of the ChangeLog from the
Git commit log to every GNOME project. the patch is trivial and I'm
pretty sure it could also teach people a thing or two about auto-tools.

ciao,
 Emmanuele.

-- 
W: http://www.emmanuelebassi.name
B: http://blogs.gnome.org/ebassi