Re: Why are so many great packages not trying to get included in GNU Emacs?

[Clément Pit-Claudel]

On 13/05/2020 10.14, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
>> Cc: address@hidden, address@hidden, address@hidden,
>>  address@hidden, address@hidden, address@hidden,
>>  address@hidden
>> From: Clément Pit-Claudel <address@hidden>
>> Date: Tue, 12 May 2020 15:48:01 -0400
>>
>> Another strategy, which doesn't solve the problem for past commits but could 
>> help for future commits, is to embed that information into commits.  
>> Something like adding a line in the commit saying 
>> "I-have-assigned-copyright: Yes".
>>
>> Of course, just adding that line doesn't prove anything: we want to make 
>> sure that we do have an assignment for that commit.
>> So, instead of adding a line, the author could sign the commit with their 
>> PGP key, saying "all these changes are mine or from sources owned by FSF" (a 
>> bit like a developer certificate of origin).
>>
>> Now the problem is reduced to "does the author with this PGP key have an 
>> assignment on file"?  But this question can be answered in a decentralized 
>> way (no need for an API): the FSF can just sign keys instead.
> 
> This will only work for some cases: when the committer is also the
> author, and when the committer has a PGP key.  So some cases will
> still need to be handled in some other way, and I suspect that those
> cases are the majority.

I have the opposite intuition, but not very much evidence.  I think it depends 
a lot on how you end up using git, too (in particular, whether patches are 
typically rebased or marged).
Alan raised the issue of PGP's complexity and availability, and I don't have 
much to say on that.  But on the committer versus author debate, as long as the 
original patch sent by the contributor is signed, it might not matter whether 
the final commit is (as long as the committer also does have papers and record 
that they checked that commit).