Re: MODULE_MAINTAINER

[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

 



On 04/04/2007 06:38 PM, Rene Herman wrote:

Rusty?

On 04/04/2007 06:00 PM, Alan Cox wrote:

Given that people seem to agree that authorship information has no place in the binary, that might actually be best.

Authorship information is very useful in the binary, especially when you
have to get lawyers involved in explaining things to people.

Okay.

So, MODULE_AUTHOR be gone?

Not if I have anything to do with it. Putting maintainer in is not a
bad idea but that assumes it gets maintained, the beauty of _AUTHOR
is that it's generally right and stays that way or approximately so.

Case in point; someone is working with me in private on a new "mitsumi" legacy CD-ROM driver. He's authoring the actual driver and upto now I've just been doing some peripheral module infrastructure work. Given that I have the hardware to test the thing, I'll be the maintainer though.

Adding myself as a MODULE_AUTHOR would be largely incorrect and adding myself as the _only_ MODULE_AUTHOR would be so factually incorrect I wouldn't, even if only from a credits point of view. Yet I do want to make sure people contact me, and not the MODULE_AUTHOR (which will happen no matter the MAINTAINERS file).

Other cases-in-point; I've lately been rummaging through sound/isa a bit. Nothing much copyrightable again but especially in those situations where (some of the) original authors are no longer active, I do again want people to contact me about them if needed. And all the "which one of the three people listed here is maintaining this" is yet another.

MODULE_AUTHOR may be approximately right but especially with old drivers it also has little relation with who's maintaining the thing.

If MODULE_AUTHOR stays, can I just have MODULE_MAINTAINER please? It doesn't need to be added to drivers directly, it can just grow (and being inside the code, I suppose it'll likely stay up to date better than the MAINTAINERS file).

Rene.

-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to [email protected]
More majordomo info at  http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at  http://www.tux.org/lkml/

[Index of Archives]     [Kernel Newbies]     [Netfilter]     [Bugtraq]     [Photo]     [Stuff]     [Gimp]     [Yosemite News]     [MIPS Linux]     [ARM Linux]     [Linux Security]     [Linux RAID]     [Video 4 Linux]     [Linux for the blind]     [Linux Resources]
  Powered by Linux