[python-committers] Use hg commit --user?

Nick Coghlan ncoghlan at gmail.com
Mon Mar 7 00:46:57 CET 2011


On Mon, Mar 7, 2011 at 8:24 AM, R. David Murray <rdmurray at bitdance.com> wrote:
> Has any progress been made on an electronically signable agreement
> and/or adding "posting a patch to this tracker means you have the right
> to contribute it and you do contribute it" language to the tracker?

Note that the latter point (regarding implicit declarations of "right
to submit" and actual submission when posting patches to the tracker)
is something we're already effectively relying on when incorporating
posted patches. The fact that such patches are almost always
derivative of the Python source in the first place also significantly
reduces the chance of legal hassles.

The situation with committers is different, because each of us can
push stuff straight into the source tree without going via the
tracker. The only way to keep our noses clean from a legal perspective
at that point is to have a contributor agreement in place that covers
everything we commit to the main repository.

The contributor-agreements-for-non-committers issue mainly comes up
when there is a substantial piece of code that was originally written
for something else, that is suggested as a patch to CPython (e.g. the
locale neutral number parsing and formatting routines).

Still, Steve's right: when we commit something, *we're* the ones
making the assertion that the change is small enough not to need a
contributor agreement, so the commit record should reflect that.

If something seems iffy, bring it up on python-dev (preferably cc'ing
VanL directly as well).

Cheers,
Nick.

-- 
Nick Coghlan   |   ncoghlan at gmail.com   |   Brisbane, Australia


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