[openstack-dev] [openstack-tc] Proposal to recognize indirect contributions to our code base

Davanum Srinivas davanum at gmail.com
Mon Nov 11 16:49:23 UTC 2013


@Ben,

Metrics tools i believe are already using information in the .mailmap
file (see nova's for example).

-- dims

On Mon, Nov 11, 2013 at 11:09 AM, Ben Nemec <openstack at nemebean.com> wrote:
> On 2013-11-11 09:57, 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.
>>
>> 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 <markmc+ibm at redhat.com>
>>
>> and we could register that address as "work done by Mark on behalf of
>> IBM" ?
>>
>> Mark.
>
>
> Another option that would work today is to just submit work for a different
> company under an e-mail address associated with that company.  I guess I'm
> not positive the metrics tools would handle a single person submitting for
> multiple companies correctly, but if they don't that's probably something
> that could and should be fixed in the tools since it's a perfectly valid
> situation.
>
> -Ben
>
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-- 
Davanum Srinivas :: http://davanum.wordpress.com



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