[GRASS-PSC] Re: code provenance

[Markus Neteler]

Hi Scott
(cc grass-psc to illustrate how (easy) the missing work is done)

On 4/18/07, Scott W Mitchell <Scott_Mitchell at carleton.ca> wrote:
...
> Looking into it today, I see from
> http://wiki.osgeo.org/index.php/GRASS_Provenance_Review
> that it's mostly done, but it looks like
> there's just the tedious but simple step of inserting license
> statements into a bunch of main.c files.  Am I interpreting the
> status correctly?

yes, it's just a bit time consuming. After several (hundred(s)) headers
I was shifting away...

> My term just ended, I'm getting the marking under control, and am
> available to help on this if that would be valuable.  Is it as simple
> as going through a list of files and adding the text?  Is that list
> already generated?

Nope, but it's (semi-)automatically done:

- be online with CVS connection possible
- have 'cvs2cl.pl' in path (http://www.red-bean.com/cvs2cl/cvs2cl.pl)
- edit tools/copywrite.pl for your preferred editor
- run:
    perl tools/copywrite.pl contributors.csv

It will run through the GRASS source code and search for main.c files which
are yet lacking a copyright statement. In the editor it will open 3 files:
- main.c itself where it inserts already a template header to be fine tuned
- description.html for verification of authors of pre-CVS times (CERL etc)
- local ChangeLog.tmp file generated on the fly

To do then in the editor:
- break long lines in this template header
- add missing authors from description.html, special attention to the
  first author (all CERL code needs manual addition of CERL author
  as first contributor since it was before CVS and doesn't appear in
  the ChangeLog.tmp file)
- remove old header is it is replaced by new, keep other
  relevant comments (don't polish too much!)

That's it. Save and the script will fetch the next candidate.

Once all is done it has to be done for each library, too. Here
I suggest to add it to the most relevant file of each library only,
not to all.

> Please let me know if I can help.

Absolutely!
Thanks
Markus