[Bug 233696] Porter's handbook: Makes clearer the official policy about port signatures

[bugzilla-noreply at freebsd.org]

https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=233696

            Bug ID: 233696
           Summary: Porter's handbook: Makes clearer the official policy
                    about port signatures
           Product: Documentation
           Version: Latest
          Hardware: Any
                OS: Any
            Status: New
          Severity: Affects Only Me
          Priority: ---
         Component: Documentation
          Assignee: doc at FreeBSD.org
          Reporter: phascolarctos at protonmail.ch

This bug report is similar to bug #228715, but slightly different.

If I understood it well, old ports are allowed to keep "Created by:..." lines
but new ports are not allowed to include one. This is based on my experience.

It still happens that new ports creators try to insert "Created by: ..." lines
(as a new FreeBSD contributor, I did it on my first new port less than 6 months
ago): the handbook discourages it, but the ports tree includes many "bad"
examples. Such examples create confusion and might make new contributors feel
bad when seeing that they cannot sign their work while others did (I felt a bit
bad at first, before understanding the policy).

Furthermore, if someone interprets this fact as "once signatures were allowed,
now they are not any more", one could think that (s)he should remove existing
lines from existing ports (like I recently did in bug #233662), which seems to
be against the official policy (unless the creator has been asked).

Specifying the correct policy once and for all in the porter's handbook is the
best way to avoid similar problem in the future: if what I think to be the
official policy is wrong, feel free to correct it.

(My personal opinion is that we should remove all signatures, both old and new:
ports change over time and creators ends up with a signature that stays on a
Makefile that can be very different to what they wrote when they left
maintainership. Credit for creation can still be recognized through other means
like Bugzilla or SVN. This policy also has the advantage to be fair between old
and new contributors.)

-- 
You are receiving this mail because:
You are the assignee for the bug.