Re: Please ship changelogs in your tarballs

[Emmanuele Bassi <ebassi gmail com>]

On Sun, 2010-10-03 at 12:58 +0200, Milan Bouchet-Valat wrote:
> Le dimanche 03 octobre 2010 à 10:48 +0100, Emmanuele Bassi a écrit :
> > 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.
> Good point, but what if the author is not the copyright owner of all the
> codebase ? Many module maintainers (like me) are releasing modifications
> of a large codebase that was written by many other people. Thus, they
> aren't the « original authors » of their module, and I'm not sure what
> rule should apply (just wondering).

if it's upstream, and you (as the maintainer) included it, then it's
part of the Program. the author of the patch should provide this
information - and she or he did, by sending you a patch.

again, section 2.a refers to the licensee, not to the person providing
the program.

> Anyway, as you said, I think it would be good to add autotools stuff for
> this, and have all modules ship with their git changelog, since it can
> be useful to distributors and users.

I'm not saying that a ChangeLog is good - though all my modules generate
one. I'm saying that if distributors want a ChangeLog coming from
upstream then they should probably promote that with trivial patches to
be incorporated upstream.

ciao,
 Emmanuele.

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