[OpenAFS-devel] "openafs" man page

[Russ Allbery]

Simon Wilkinson <sxw@inf.ed.ac.uk> writes:

> This isn't the kind of material that would traditionally appear in a
> manpage, certainly not with the kind of verbosity you are suggesting
> (our contributors list, alone, is over 200 names). There's a tradition
> on Linux and some other systems of putting this kind of information,
> along with a copy of the license, into /usr/share/doc/. I'm not against
> having a manpage, but I do think that something along these lines would
> be more in keeping.

There are other projects that ship this information as a man page (Perl,
for instance), but they're fairly rare.  I agree with Simon that this is
most normally handled as a separate file that's included in
/usr/share/doc.  (That's also what the GNU coding standards suggest, for
what it's worth.)

> We also badly need to come up with some kind of statement on adding
> copyright messages to source code files. There are far too many files in
> the tree that start with loads of lines of different and, in many cases,
> contradictory licenses. I think we should only permit one license per
> source code file (I've no objection to adding copyright holders to an
> existing license, though). If a contributor wishes to add code under
> their own licence, and that is acceptable to the gatekeepers, then they
> should do so in its own file.

I strongly agree with this.  I'd also like to explicitly limit the
licenses that we accept for future contributions to either the IBM Public
License or a well-established, well-known phrasing of a clearly free
license (BSD, MIT, Apache 2.0, Clarified Artistic, public domain where
appropriate, etc.), ruling out GPL as we have to because of the IBM Public
License incompatibility (even apart from any other issues).  Edge-case or
rarely used licenses are really not worth the ongoing hassle of dealing
with.

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra@stanford.edu)             <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>