Branden Robinson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > On Sun, Dec 02, 2001 at 10:50:21PM -0800, Thomas Bushnell, BSG wrote: > > (The issue of marking modifications is one that applies to the GPL as > > well, and is frequently not followed by most people, alas, at least > > not within the terms of the license strictly.) > > Perhaps dpkg should be modified to automatically put the package > maintainer's name at the top of a source .diff file before compressing > it; these would remain "legal" diffs and since the unified diff > information already includes date information, this, combined with the > Project's strong preference for "pristine upstream tarballs", would > probably serve to bring a lot of Debian packages automatically into > compliance, if they're not already.
Perhaps. The GPL rule is that the modified file must contain the modifier's name and the date *of the modification*--diff doesn't know that, because it can only look at file timestamps. It would need to be that applying the patch to the file causes the resulting patched file to contain the modifier's name and the date he did the modification (which, for practical purposes, is in general not the date patch was run, nor the date diff was run).
