A reply to: http://buytaert.net/a-method-for-giving-credit-to-organizations-that-contribute-code-to-open-source
This is a great idea and it's a step in the right direction.
As mention in this thread the core developers have switch to using an external tool to track their contribution over at http://ericduran.github.io/drupalcores/ (I created/maintain that project). This project was badly needed because of the lack of visibility into such work on drupal.org.
Core developers have also switch to an external tools for generating the commit messages that goes into every commit (For this they use Dreditor - https://dreditor.org/). This project was also badly needed since it was pretty much impossible to generate a proper commit message without an automated tool.
The new commit message standard is a step in the write direction but without the proper tooling this isn't going to do much.
What I would like to see is a commitment from drupal.org to improve the tooling require to support this new standard. The best way to start is probably by updating the comment section on drupal.org to have support for associating a specific comment/action/patch with a @company*client.
This HAS to be the 1st step if not we're just going to put a bigger burden on the developers of these tools (drupalcores, Dreditor) to try and parse the data out of a random signature in a comment or something.
Also this is a great post but this standard would need to move beyond this blog if it's going to become a thing. Right now the commit message is just a "Strongly Recommended Standard". There are still commits that go into core that do not follow the standards being used by drupalcores or Dreditor and the problem is a lot bigger in contrib where depending on the maintainer of a project it's the wild wild west ;-).
The people that want to see this happen will make it happen but ideally it'll be nice if we had the support of drupal.org.
This is what I imagine would be the steps require for this to actually be put in place:
- The standard fully define and available in drupal.org
- Provide links to the standard from every project for maintainers (so they can be aware of it, it's far to say some people aren't aware of this).
- Update the drupal.org issue comments to support an attribution field where a user can specify the attribution aka ericduran@nbcuni
- Update drupal.org issues to properly format the attribution data and aggregate it properly for a commit message
I see the above list as a minimum requirement to get the ball rolling. There is still a lot more to be done but the rest can be handled by external tools which can then be easily migrated to drupal.org.
-- Eric Duran ericduran@nbcuni (See what I did there ;-) )