On Sun, 2010-10-03 at 11:23 +0200, Josselin Mouette wrote: > There should be no need to remind you that the GPL mandates a changelog > or something similar to be present in all source distributions.
it's the NEWS file. if you're referring to the 2.a clause in the GPLv2, i.e.: """ 2. You may modify your copy or copies of the Program or any portion of it, thus forming a work based on the Program, and copy and distribute such modifications or work under the terms of Section 1 above, provided that you also meet all of these conditions: a) You must cause the modified files to carry prominent notices stating that you changed the files and the date of any change. """ then the section is referring to the licensee, i.e. people redistributing the program under the terms of the license, not the original authors of the program itself; in this case, the Debian developer applying distribution patches and thus modifying the copy of the program. obviously, IANAL, but the wording is pretty clear in this case. since you brought up the legal issues I'd suggest you talk to a lawyer to clarify this bit, because a lot of GPL-v2 licensed projects - within and without the GNOME project - use ChangeLog entries like this: yyyy-mm-dd em...@address *: Miscellaneous fixes to make everything work and that I'm pretty sure does not *at all* conform to section 2.a of the license. *if*, on the other hand, you want a ChangeLog because it makes your life as a packager easier (for some unknown reason) then you should probably ask for a Gnome Goal to add the autogeneration of the ChangeLog from the Git commit log to every GNOME project. the patch is trivial and I'm pretty sure it could also teach people a thing or two about auto-tools. ciao, Emmanuele. -- W: http://www.emmanuelebassi.name B: http://blogs.gnome.org/ebassi _______________________________________________ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list