Greetings Eclipse Committers.
We're making a change to the contribution process.
As you are aware, when you receive contributions from developers who are not project committers, we require those contributors to have signed the
Eclipse Contributor Agreement (ECA) and for their contributions to to include a "Signed-off-by" footer with credentials that match those specified in the "Author" field in their commit comments. This combination serves an indication that the contributor understands and accepts the terms of the
Developer Certificate of Origin (DCO) that is embedded in the ECA.
Effective March 30 at 1200h EDT, we are removing the "Signed-off-by" requirement. Instead, we believe that the combination of an author's email address in the "Author" field of a commit and having a valid ECA (or equivalent committer agreement) on file fulfill the DCO's "sign-off" requirement. That is, contributors must still sign the ECA, and must use the credentials associated with their Eclipse Foundation account in the "Author" field of all Git commits, but are no longer required to include a "Signed-off-by" footer in their commit comments. Note that it is not wrong for commits to include "Signed-off-by", it is just no longer required to meet our IP management goals.
The Eclipse Webmaster is rolling out updates to the repository hooks that had previously enforced this requirement and we are updating related documentation, including the
Eclipse Foundation Project Handbook.
While I have your attention, a team of researchers would like your input.
I, together with a team of researchers, am trying to help improve software documentation and maintainability of open-source projects by providing automatic support of source code comments based on code review discussions as a final goal. We believe that code review tools store important discussions, and possible decisions, which can be useful for the project documentation. Thus, as a starting point, we would like to learn identifying relevant information from code review discussions such that tooling can be developed to improve software documentation and maintainability of open-source projects. If you are interested in talking about your experiences as an open-source reviewer then please schedule a meeting with us using YouCanBook.me here: https://tue-interview.youcanbook.me.
Kind regards and thanks in advance,
Nicole Novielli, University of Bari,
Fernando Castor, Federal University of Pernambuco,
Christoph Treude, University of Adelaide,
Alexander Serebrenik, Eindhoven University of Technology,
Felipe Ebert, Eindhoven University of Technology
Thanks,
Wayne
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Wayne Beaton
Director of Open Source Projects | Eclipse Foundation
