Re: Ensuring commit messages with correct copyright info

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen <address@hidden>
> Date: Tue, 08 Mar 2016 19:47:29 +0100
> 
> The thing that comes up, again and again, as the main reason we should
> be able to edit commit messages (and therefore we should have
> ChangeLogs, because we can edit those) is that we (er, mainly me :-))
> sometimes forget to put
> 
> Copyright-paperwork-exempt: yes
> 
> into the commit messages.

It's one problem, but it's not the only one.  Just look at the
generated ChangeLog file, and you will see the blunders.  We need to
educate contributors to do a better job, and I see no way of doing
that without some means of fixing the mistakes.

> So why not concentrate of fixing that particular problem?  I think
> something that might help is that if the committer is different from the
> author, then there should always be something in the commit message that
> explicitly says what the copyright status of the work is.
> 
> That is, unless the line
> 
> Copyright-paperwork-exempt: yes
> 
> or the line
> 
> Copyright-assigned: yes
> 
> is present in the commit message, then the commit... hooks? (the thing
> that refuses to check in files with trailing newlines etc; I don't know
> the details about how that works) should refuse the commit.
> 
> Then it should be pretty impossible to forget this stuff, and there's
> one less reason to want to edit the commit messages.

So you are suggesting that instead of doing TRT in perhaps 2% of
commit messages, we should now add a completely redundant text in 98%
of them?  How does this make sense?

> (Note: This hook should only be run if there's an Author: header in the
> vc log buffer.  Everybody who has commit rights have already assigned
> copyright, so it's unnecessary to add those if the committer and the
> author are the same person.)

I already use --author in those cases, why should I do anything else?