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Date: Wed, 15 Feb 2012 18:08:04 -0500
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Subject: Re: How to give proper attributions to patches?
From: Rob Weir <robweir@apache.org>
To: ooo-dev@incubator.apache.org
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On Wed, Feb 15, 2012 at 4:44 PM, Pedro Giffuni <pfg@apache.org> wrote:
> Hello;
>
> After closing a bugzilla issue I received a very well
> presented and reasonable request:
> ______
>
> Thanks Pedro for pushing the patch.
> I'm glad that this long time issue was solved. Soon I would
> like to contribute more patches to OpenOffice.
>
> I spend a lot of hours to fix this issue.
>
> Could you please add my name to the list of contributor?
> ______
>
> This is the type of contributors we need, and it's the
> kind of people I would like to motivate to sign an iCLA
> and eventually become an Apache committer.
>
> Perhaps we should establish some policy concerning
> the list of contributors (where is it, BTW?); no
> idea if we want to distinguish between recent (AOO)
> contributors and previous (OOo) contributors.
>

I think this is at two levels:

1) Give credit in the commit memo when committing the patch

2) Add to credits list here:  http://www.openoffice.org/welcome/credits.html

That page is what we point to from the about box, I believe. It is
very out-of-date.  It does not include you or me.

In any case, if we get the SVN side correct, and do it in a consistent
way, then we can easily extract a list of patch submitters to add to
the credits page before each release.   For example:  "Fixed overflow
error in smallBuffer (patch from Joe Bloggs)".

But what about other areas, like forum volunteers, people submitting
bugs, people helping on ooo-users, people designing logos, etc. ?

Of course, another approach is to not have a credits page.  That takes
us out of the "arms race" to see which project can come up with the
largest number of minor contributors.  Going down that path eventually
leads to you crediting the authors of every module that AOO depends
on, including build tools and compilers.  At some point you bottom out
by listing Alan Turing.

A third approach would be to let those who care add their own name.
So instead of a web page for credits, move that to the wiki, and
invite contributors to add their own info. We sort of do that already,
with the "people" page, but that is not as easy to edit as the wiki.

-Rob


> Pedro.
>