On 11/11/2013 10:57 AM, Mark McLoughlin wrote: > Hi Nick, > > On Mon, 2013-11-11 at 15:20 +0100, Nicolas Barcet wrote: >> Dear TC members, >> >> Our companies are actively encouraging our respective customers to have the >> patches they mission us to make be contributed back upstream. In order to >> encourage this behavior from them and others, it would be nice that if >> could gain some visibility as "sponsors" of the patches in the same way we >> get visibility as "authors" of the patches today. >> >> The goal here is not to provide yet another way to count affiliations of >> direct contributors, nor is it a way to introduce sales pitches in contrib. >> The only acceptable and appropriate use of the proposal we are making is >> to signal when a patch made by a contributor for another comany than the >> one he is currently employed by. >> >> For example if I work for a company A and write a patch as part of an >> engagement with company B, I would signal that Company B is the sponsor of >> my patch this way, not Company A. Company B would under current >> circumstances not get any credit for their indirect contribution to our >> code base, while I think it is our intent to encourage them to contribute, >> even indirectly. >> >> To enable this, we are proposing that the commit text of a patch may >> include a >> sponsored-by: <sponsorname> >> line which could be used by various tools to report on these commits. >> Sponsored-by should not be used to report on the name of the company the >> contributor is already affiliated to. > > Honestly, I've an immediately negative reaction to the prospect of e.g. > > Sponsored-By: Red Hat > Sponsored-By: IBM > > appearing in our commit messages. > > I feel strongly that the project is first and foremost a community of > individuals and we instinctively push as much of corporate backing side > of things outside of the project. We try to spend as little time as > possible talking about our affiliations as possible. > > And, IMHO, the git commit log is particularly sacred ground - almost > above anything else, it is a place for purely technical details.
This was exactly my reaction, as well. I just hadn't been able to come up with a good alternate proposal, yet. > However, I do think we'll be able to figure out some way of making it > easier for tools to track more complex affiliations. > > Our affiliation databases are all keyed off email addresses right now, > so how about if we allowed for encoding affiliation/sponsorship in > addresses? e.g. > > Author: Mark McLoughlin <[email protected]> > > and we could register that address as "work done by Mark on behalf of > IBM" ? That doesn't seem any better to me. It actually seems more likely to break, since someone could be using an email address with '+' in it for some other reason, right? I think it may be worth looking at this from a different angle. Perhaps we should tone down the focus on company metrics, and perhaps remove them completely from anything we control or have influence over. -- Russell Bryant _______________________________________________ OpenStack-dev mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openstack.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/openstack-dev
