Re: In support of Jonas Bernoulli's Magit

[Phillip Lord]

Richard Stallman <address@hidden> writes:
>   > As it stood, I think, dash.el took 4 months, because of the necessity
>   > for the to-ing and fro-ing. dash.el in ELPA is now several versions
>   > behind, because it's has some new contributors since,
>
> The way to avoid this is for the developers of dash.el to ask new
> contributors "please sign papers", as we do.
>
> Why is that not happening?


Well, I need to add something to the README file, but I never got around
to it. From a practical POV, though, this also means potentially not
accepting pull requests from people, till the assignment has happened,
which is likely to be weeks to months.


>   > The FSF has a donations drive every year. Can you not spend some
>   > of that on making the process easier?
>
> We do.  That is one of the things that some of our staff work on.
> Alas, there are many other tasks waiting for them.
>
> The best solution for this hassle is to avoid it -- by collecting
> legal papers as the package is developed.

It doesn't avoid the hassle. It just makes it a hassle at the point at
which people first contribute.

>   > Even a public website showing people with
>   > assignment (who are willing to be public) would help.
>
> That sounds like something feasible to do.  I think we could
> easily find 100 Emacs developers who would be happy to agree
> to this.
>
> Can you make the idea more precise?  What should this look like?
> Also, how would it help?

That was step 1 in my protocol. Work out who you need to get copyright
assignment from, given that many people will already have it. It would
also help with working out when peoples assignments run out. I do not
know when mine is out of date, for example.

Being able to get access to this data in a parsable form. Currently, I
get contributor information from git (git log --pretty=format:"%an %ae"
| sort -u). Being able to filter people who already have assignment
would be great.

Phil