On 6/17/14, 1:47 PM, Alex Moundalexis wrote:
This kind of response is hardly conducive to prospective contributors. We should consider ourselves lucky whenever a contributor provides a patch, let alone runs a build. Expecting a new contributor be fully aware of the Apache licensing details isn't realistic, much less being aware of the arguments concerning Rat; if the ignoreErrors argument is TheWay, it ought to be mentioned prominently in the source documentation [1], but I don't think that's correct either... I don't want to encourage contributors to skip the build. I want contributors to be aware of the licensing requirements, but not at the expense of providing otherwise-viable patches. I'd recommend relaxing the Rat checks for contributors, and making it a required part of the profile for automated Jenkins builds and during the release process. The onus should be on the committers to ensure that all of the licensing is in place before the release, but preferably long before that point by guiding the contributor to make the necessary license additions before the commit.
This is an important thing to remember. The point of shepherding contributors is to eventually get them to committer status, at which point they'll be personally responsible for these things. While we definitely don't want to be to abrasive initially that they get fed up and go away, we can't fully insulate from the necessary either.
I've been told to correct whitespace at the end of a line before and to re-submit a patch, seems trivial to address missing licensing files in the same way. [1] https://accumulo.apache.org/source.html
