TM, continued.

[Kaleb S. KEITHLEY]

Keith Packard wrote:

> Around 13 o'clock on Mar 19, Jim Gettys wrote:
> 
> 
>>He suggests when we modify a file with the tags present that
>>we modify it to say "Based on XFree86" and the rest of the CVS
>>tag information.
> 
> 
> To avoid possible problems in failing to do this, I suggest that we
> change every tag in the system to
> 
> /* Based on $XFree86: ... $ */
> 

Are you going to change all the $Xorg and $XC tags too?

What are you going to do when a judge says "Based on..." means the same 
thing as "Derived from...."? To me they're nearly synonymous. I wouldn't 
be surprised if a judge thought so too.

I believe the lawyer is giving you bad advise. I'd either leave them 
alone or make make them say something that more accurately describes the 
situation, e.g. /* In the $XFree86: repository this file is version .... */

Aside from that, I believe most people who know software development and 
source code control grok that the presence of the XFree86 CVS tags in 
the sources are just artifacts of the fact that XFree86 forked the XC 
tree all those years ago and that they have no meaning beyond that.

98% (my estimate) of the files in the tree were originally MIT and X 
Consortium files, or derived from them, or originally contributed to MIT 
or XC, before XFree86 ever scribbled their CVS tags in them.

Beyond that, changing CVS tags in 13400+ files is a lot of changes -- 
whether the changes are automated or not.

> We can easily automate that process and avoid future problems.
> 
> And, at the same time, we can add regular $Id: $ lines above that and make 
> sure our CVS tags are included.  Given a shared CVS repository, there's no 
> real need to use a custom tag any longer -- people who want to create a 
> private repository can deal with the problem themselves.

Pffft. There's no real need to do lots of things. If we were to base all 
our decisions on Real Need® we wouldn't be doing modular trees or 
autotooling either.

The xorg repo is already doing $XdotOrg tags for anyone that bothers to 
add it. Since it's not hard I'd like to know why we need to think more 
than once about creating Problems (with a capital P) that other people 
might have to deal with?

Either don't put a tag in at all -- because some people have a problem 
with adding tags -- or use a unique one that's easy to identify.

--

Kaleb