I'm still in the process of finishing the rewrite of the builtin/blame.c internals. Now there are various questions regarding the final patch proposals and commit messages. Point 1) signing off implies that I'm fine with the licensing of the file. builtin/blame.c merely states /* * Blame * * Copyright (c) 2006, Junio C Hamano */ which obviously will not match the authorship of my contributions. Since Junio has given blanket permission to reuse his Git contributions under other licenses (see <URL:https://github.com/libgit2/libgit2/blob/development/git.git-authors#L58>) that I am not going to license my work under, the first commit in the respective series would replace this header with /* * Blame * * Copyright (c) 2006--2014, Junio C Hamano and others * Licensed under GPLv2. See Git's COPYING file for details. */ That should be reasonably accurate boilerplate, I think, and should avoid code from multiple authors to be erroneously assumed subjected to agreements other than the default Git project licensing. Which brings us to further nitty-gritty details. Personally, I'm fine with permitting licensing contributions of mine under GPLv2 or later. Is there any clearing house where I can have this sentiment recorded in a manner where potential heirs (which according to copyright law will retain control over my works even when born after my demise, so I cannot in good conscience vouch for their common sense) cannot contest it? Like putting Permissable-Licenses: GPL Version 2 or later in the commit message? And finally, the ugly: I don't have any income apart from volunteers paying me for writing Free Software, so a contribution like this one, having taken substantial time, will make for a rather tepid report of my GNU LilyPond activities in January and a corresponding slackening of volunteer payments for what I could have been doing instead. It's not the first performance shortcoming of Git I have worked on. In contrast to most other contributors, I won't be able to afford following a whim for addressing such deficiencies in future without a chance for recouping my losses. My experience with GNU LilyPond has led me to conclude that the best chance of getting voluntary payments is to appeal to those who are most invested in the well-being of the software. It's a sad reality that they tend to be identical to those who are already investing substantial amounts of time and effort into the project themselves. So I'll put the respective begging notice into the cover letter of the patch series: I don't think it belongs in the commit messages, and it's not likely to be effective anyway. While I could put a "Prepaid-by:" footer into the commit messages, the main effect would likely be to trigger the "somebody else's problem" effect. My experience with this kind of polite notice is that it's good for the equivalent of a case of beer every ten years. If the performance enhancements are mentioned in a release announcement, adding a notice along the line "The performance of git blame has been significantly improved by David Kastrup <dak@xxxxxxx>. If this affects you, consider contributing to his reimbursement." would of course also be welcome. Ok, this should be about covering the bad and the ugly. I'm still working on the -C and -M replacements given the new code. Hopefully finished this weekend. All the best -- David Kastrup -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe git" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html