Re: [groff] 01/01: Remove erroneous "revised by" attribution.

[Ingo Schwarze]

Hi Peter,

thanks for fixing that.

Actually, how that error got introduced is quite interesting.
The erroneous attribution was added in commit 1a0ea2d7
on Sep 20 00:35:44 2014 +0200 with this commit message:

  all man-pages in groff source tree: use \[aq], \[oq], \[cq], \[co]

and this ChangeLog entry:

  * Man-pages (*.man) in the whole groff source tree: Improve
    documents by adding \[co], \[cq], \[aq] instead of ` or ' and use
    also \[co] as long as it makes sense.  Remove \[en] in the years
    date in order to allow the automatic license year increasing.

No word about content changes - but a brief look at the committed
changes reveals that there are lots of content changes, actually.

That commit touches 82 files,
the output of "git show" has over twelve thousand lines.

In the case at hand, Bernd apparently misunderstood this old content:

-.de authors
-.P
-.B mom
-was written by
-.MT address@hidden
-Peter Schaffter
-.ME .
[...]
-.de copyleft
-.nh
-Copyright (C) 2002-2014  Free Software Foundation, Inc.
-written by Werner Lemberg <address@hidden>
-revised 2012 by Peter Schaffter <address@hidden>

and changed it to say something completely different:

+.de au
+mom was written by
+.MT address@hidden
+Peter Schaffter
+.ME
+and revised by
+.MT address@hidden
+Werner Lemberg
+.ME .

The lesson to learn here: careless and unreliable persons should
not be allowed to make large commits, not even seemingly trivial
ones, because the likely outcome is that nobody finds the time to
review what was committed.

God knows what else got broken in that 12k lines diff...

Yours,
  Ingo


Peter Schaffter wrote on Mon, Dec 10, 2018 at 01:58:46PM -0500:

> PTPi pushed a commit to branch master
> in repository groff.
> 
> commit fced8b936946cd63f25c0c02791e40ac9cd969f9
> Author: Peter Schaffter <address@hidden>
> Date:   Mon Dec 10 13:57:39 2018 -0500
> 
>     Remove erroneous "revised by" attribution.
> ---
>  contrib/mom/groff_mom.7.man | 4 ----
>  1 file changed, 4 deletions(-)
> 
> diff --git a/contrib/mom/groff_mom.7.man b/contrib/mom/groff_mom.7.man
> index aa3f451..6cb2bcd 100644
> --- a/contrib/mom/groff_mom.7.man
> +++ b/contrib/mom/groff_mom.7.man
> @@ -3352,10 +3352,6 @@ after NEWPAGE, like this:
>  was written by
>  .MT address@hidden:schaffter.ca
>  Peter Schaffter
> -.ME
> -and revised by
> -.MT address@hidden:gnu.org
> -Werner Lemberg
>  .ME .
>  .
>  PDF support was provided by