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

[Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca>]

> I would like to compare the two elisp libraries, BBDB 2 and BBDB 3, for
> copyright purposes and would appreciate any other suggestions that'll
> aid a plebe such as myself in the endeavor.
> How to differentiate, for instance, Jamie's work from Roland's work?

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