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On 04/04/2007 06:00 PM, Alan Cox wrote: >> Given that people seem to agree that authorship information has no place >> in the binary, that might actually be best. > > Authorship information is very useful in the binary, especially when you > have to get lawyers involved in explaining things to people. Okay. >> So, MODULE_AUTHOR be gone? > > Not if I have anything to do with it. Putting maintainer in is not a > bad idea but that assumes it gets maintained, the beauty of _AUTHOR > is that it's generally right and stays that way or approximately so. Case in point; someone is working with me in private on a new "mitsumi" legacy CD-ROM driver. He's authoring the actual driver and upto now I've just been doing some peripheral module infrastructure work. Given that I have the hardware to test the thing, I'll be the maintainer though. Adding myself as a MODULE_AUTHOR would be largely incorrect and adding myself as the _only_ MODULE_AUTHOR would be so factually incorrect I wouldn't, even if only from a credits point of view. Yet I do want to make sure people contact me, and not the MODULE_AUTHOR (which will happen no matter the MAINTAINERS file). Other cases-in-point; I've lately been rummaging through sound/isa a bit. Nothing much copyrightable again but especially in those situations where (some of the) original authors are no longer active, I do again want people to contact me about them if needed. And all the "which one of the three people listed here is maintaining this" is yet another. MODULE_AUTHOR may be approximately right but especially with old drivers it also has little relation with who's maintaining the thing. If MODULE_AUTHOR stays, can I just have MODULE_MAINTAINER please? It doesn't need to be added to drivers directly, it can just grow (and being inside the code, I suppose it'll likely stay up to date better than the MAINTAINERS file). Rene. - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/ | ||||||||||||
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