Hi Guille,
this issue is /really/ important to me. People are helping me migrate
VMMaker to GitHub and it is /treally/ important to the project that
authorship history is maintained, because finding out who to ask when code
is affected is essential. VMMaker is large, very complex and has had many
contributors. Wiping authorship is unacceptable to me. I'm glad that
Peter's tool is being used in the migration. Hence my responses below..
On Sat, Sep 29, 2018 at 4:34 AM Guillermo Polito <guillermopol...@gmail.com>
wrote:
>
> On Sat, Sep 29, 2018 at 12:41 PM Peter Uhnak <i.uh...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Hi Stef,
>>
>> I understand that everyone is short on time, but I consider not
>> preserving the history problematic for two reasons
>>
>> * it is appropriating someone else's work as one's own -- this seems
>> borderline illegal, or at the very least in violation of MIT license
>>
>
> Not really. If the contributors are specified in the copyright, is it
> stealing?
>
> Now, my point is manners. I got in 4/5 emails:
> - you're stupid because you did not use Peter's tool
> - you're inefficient because you took one hour to do it
> - you're stealing
>
> The first two points show first one big problem that I've seem many times
> with people and software: missing context.
> People think most of the time that "I would have done it better". But
> usually they don't take into account
> - the time constraints (I had one hour, and one hour I had)
> - the knowledge (where is the Artefact Repo?, why is it failing for
> Milton?, Do I know enough about metacello/streams/artefact to do it well?)
> - the working environment (does the person that did it have all the tools
> to work properly? does he have a healthy working environment? For example,
> I've worked on several big companies where you can find really bad
> environments...)
> - technical and not technical problems that are sometimes independent of
> the problem itself (take into account that for example, fighting against a
> metacello baseline is completely orthogonal to your tool or even iceberg,
> good internet connection)
>
> All these details are important also at the end, and they should be put
> into the balance too when we make a judgement.
>
>
>> * it is sending bad signals to potential contributors that we can scrub
>> them anytime we want
>>
>> as you yourself have said:
>> > @People try to avoid to piss on good will of others.
>> Yet this is what it feels like to some when traces of their contributions
>> are voided.
>>
>
> And this is my third point. This "stealing" idea is mainly a matter of
> manners.
> I really hope nobody here really thinks I wanted to take credit for
> Olivier, Guillaume or any of the other contributors.
> Still I preserved pointers to the original authors and their original
> website in google sites.
>
That's simply not good enough. The minimum acceptable solution is that
within Pharo, within a browser, one can find out who authored what method,
class comment, and preferably class declaration (we don't have this yet).
Going outside to find out who authored is an unacceptable regression.
But in the case somebody did think that, I removed the repository to remove
> any doubt.
> So again, I apologize if somebody felt offended, but I also prefer to not
> be called a thief.
>
> Now, when I do stuff I'm not thinking about "oh yes, I'm getting famous",
> that would be pretty sad for me :/.
> I do stuff because I just think it's useful.
> I DON'T CARE personally about artefact, and I don't want to take credit
> for it.
> I don't even care about the fu***ng 2 commits I did to port it to Pharo 7,
> I can tell anybody what I did so she/he can re-doit.
> Because I don't use Artefact. Now, Somebody wants the "credit"? I could
> have even amended a commit and put anybody else as author.
>
But dot you see that voiding authorship a) gives the impression of
stealing, and clearly opens you up to the accusation of stealing, no matter
what your actual intent is? And do you see that vitally important
information is being lost? If this application had, as VMMaker does,
hundreds of contributors then tracking down who last modified what, which
is really important information, is made much harder.
My problem here is people assuming stealing by default, instead of
> assuming, for example, mistake.
> Imagine an alternative scenario:
> - X: "Hey Guille, could you add in the copyright X, and Y and Z? They
> also contributed to the project, you should take them into account..."
> - Guille: "Ah sure, sorry, this was not my intention, I'm so stupid, I
> forgot about Z. Commit push, done".
>
> If instead of bashing on people, we wanted to discuss on how to actually
> FIX the thing, here are my 2 cents:
> - From a copyright perspective it should have been enough to check the
> licence file and name the contributors there
> - The history could have been retrieved in a separate branch and then
> merged (and look, we had the best of the two worlds!)
> - both of the things could have been then integrated through a pull
> request (luckily in less than one hour :))
>
Well, for me, it its not about copyright, it is about authorship,
attribution and communication. I /have/ to be able to determine original
authors to have a chance at getting help with issues that arise. I hope
the use case helps motivate you to preserve authorship.
>
> And at the end, with the apport of everybody we could have got a
> repository with history, baseline and working on pharo 7.
>
> Now, from a human perspective, please let's try everybody to assume the
> best of the other by default.
> That will just make all interactions much more healthy.
>
> And please, this is not particularly directed to anybody, I've seen such
> remarks many times. Let's just think positive.
> Problems can be fixed if we talk about them, but more specifically if we
> are looking for solutions.
>
_,,,^..^,,,_
best, Eliot
