Re: small enhancements to gdb here..

[Stan Shebs <shebs at apple dot com>]

Michael Snyder wrote:
> 
> Don Beusee wrote:
> >
> > Ugh!!  That is too much work.  If you will not accept this email as agreement to transfer copyright control over to FSF, then forget it.  I am not going through all that hastle just to submit a few very minor enhancements.
> 
> I'm sorry Don, but them's the rules.  If you won't fill out
> a copywrite assignment, then we cannot accept any gdb patch
> from you thats bigger than ten lines or so.  Anything beyond
> a few spelling corrections, in other words.  These are not
> our rules, they are the Free Software Foundation's, and they
> have been in place pretty much since the beginning.

I looked over this patch, and if it were up to me, I would accept
it without copyright assignment.  It looks big because it gloms
together several different changes, and obviously we shouldn't
say a submission is "too big" just because the contributor
didn't make it as three separate additions.

When evaluating changes that are right on the edge of assignability,
it's a good idea to evaluate according to the purpose of the policy,
which is to ensure that the FSF clearly owns all of the code in GNU.
The "10-line" rule is just a guideline, and must be applied with
some intelligence - a 1-line version of Cisco's core routing algorithm
must definitely have a copyright assignment, while 1000 lines of
prototypes and beautification does not need anything.

Stan