Re: Best way to get hang of an elisp file?

[Sean Sieger <sean.sieger@gmail.com>]

Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca> writes:

> That can be fairly difficult, indeed.
>
> The way I do it, usually, is to look at all the commits by authors for
> whom we don't have copyright papers yet.  I group them by author.
>
> For all authors whose sum of commits is small enough to be considered
> "trivial", we don't need paperwork, so I take them out.
>
> For all remaining authors, I look at all their commits and try to track
> that code's subsequent life, to see if it has been removed/overwritten
> and figure out where it can still be found in the latest version of
> the code (in case it was moved, reindented, ...).
>
> In the case of BBDB, this is rather difficult because Jamie's code is
> fairly large, so it's a lot of work to track his code through all of
> Roland's changes to see what remains.
>
> So I think we'd need to use some other approach.  E.g. Roland should be
> able to give us some important indications like "all this file is only
> mine", "all that file was completely rewritten".
>
>
>         Stefan

Thank you for your time, Stefan.

I have been trying to compare the two versions and this will help, as
have Roland's comments---posts as of recent.  I would like to volunteer
my help on this, and if anyone else has guidance to offer, I'm all
ears.