[U-Boot] [PATCH 13/60] ARM: tegra: sort some board file include directives

Stephen Warren swarren at wwwdotorg.org
Tue Apr 26 18:18:06 CEST 2016


On 04/25/2016 05:22 PM, Tom Rini wrote:
...
> I know company lawyers come up with various policies and some are more
> restrictive than others.  Anything about the exact guidelines you can
> share would be appreciated.

They're simple and I would assume quite standard:

1) When creating a new file, add an NVIDIA copyright header.

2) When performing a non-trival edit to an existing file, if it has an 
existing NVIDIA copyright header, update the data, and if not, add one.

Guidance on "non-trivial" isn't given. I would take it to mean anything 
other than typos and whitespace fixes.

Re-ordering your email slightly:
> I want to echo my agreement on this point.  Re-ordering includes does
> not rise to the level of adding copyright/author/etc lines.

I can see your argument re: copyright headers in the individual files, 
although again I'd echo my previous comments re: a simple and 
unambiguous process being preferable.

However, I don't agree with that argument for the patch/series overall; 
it's certainly a creative process with work behind it to decide upon and 
implement the overall operation. But, if the changes to every individual 
file are trivial and the real work is in the idea (of the appropriate 
directory organization/separation) itself, there's nowhere left to 
represent that. Perhaps copyright should be applied to the patch as a 
whole, and represented in the patch description, rather than individual 
files in this case. I don't imagine that would satisfy lawyers though, 
since e.g. .tar distributions would not contain that meta-data. I wonder 
if an overall README listing all copyright holders and saying "for 
details, see git log" would be satisfactory to them, at least for 
"cleanup style" commits.


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