Christopher Faylor wrote: > On Tue, Sep 08, 2009 at 09:16:57PM +0200, Corinna Vinschen wrote: >> On Sep 7 16:05, Christopher Faylor wrote: >>> On Thu, Sep 03, 2009 at 11:04:38PM +0200, Corinna Vinschen wrote: >>>> Thanks for the patches Eric, but, here's a problem. We still have no >>>> copyright assignment in place from you. The fcntl patch is barely >>>> trivial, but the faccessat patch certainly isn't anymore. Would it >>>> be a big problem for you to send the filled out copyright assignemnt form >>> >from http://cygwin.com/assign.txt to Red Hat ASAP? With any luck it >>>> will have arrived and will be signed before I'm back from vacation. >>> I don't understand why this isn't considered trivial but a basically >>> equivalent change to fix other errnos is: >>> >>> http://cygwin.com/ml/cygwin/2009-09/msg00178.html >> It's 2 vs. 30 lines of changes. That's hardly equivalent. > > But each of those changes were obvious and each could have been > contributed separately, one for every function. That would have > made them trivial.
There's no simple answer to this, it seems. On the one hand(*), the GNU maintainers' handbook suggests that multiple trivial patches /can/ over time add up to a substantial contribution(**): > A change of just a few lines (less than 15 or so) is not legally > significant for copyright. A regular series of repeated changes, such as > renaming a symbol, is not legally significant even if the symbol has to be > renamed in many places. Keep in mind, however, that a series of minor > changes by the same person can add up to a significant contribution. What > counts is the total contribution of the person; it is irrelevant which > parts of it were contributed when. On the other hand, for example, in accord with the second sentence of that paragraph, binutils just accepted a *huge* patch without an assignment - but it was completely mechanical (renaming symbols to avoid c++ compilation errors). There's going to be a big gray area in between this kind of trivial, potentially-automatable mechanical replacement that is obviously OK and the level of a patch with (e.g.) a big bunch of new functions or code that is obviously not OK (without an assignment). I'm not sure where this patch falls, except to say that it's in there somewhere. I think I'd be inclined to accept it if anyone argued that the repeated cutting-and-pasting of the set_errno hunk was one change with some mechanical repetition and counted it as only five lines. cheers, DaveK -- (*) - disclaimer: Cygwin is of course a RedHat project and so need not operate to the same standards as the FSF holds to; examples are only examples and not represented as definitive, canonical, or legally binding; contents may have settled in shipping or packing; YMMV, IANALATEIHSMBSI, fnord! (**) - http://www.gnu.org/prep/maintain/maintain.html#Legally-Significant