Propose changes for more descriptive pull requests

[PhilETaylor]

Propose changes for more descriptive pull requests, because, well, why not.

To encourage better pull request text so that maintainers have more information on which to make quicker merge decisions without having to go to a million pages to locate the information they need.

To encourage developers to think more about Licensing Compliance and Security.

[mbabker]

👎 this is a core reviewer responsibility, expecting that contributors have their changes reviewed for legal compliance is asking for too much

[mbabker]

If there are questions about legal compliance for a change proposal it should be the project's responsibility to seek answers about it. Not pawn that off on contributors. Contributors are expected to provide change proposals that are compliant with the software licenses, it should not be a contributor's responsibility to review every clause of a license and find of their own due diligence a requirement for an annotation to be added to a file indicating a change from the upstream source, a requirement which is probably different based on the license of the code in question.

[mbabker]

If you're expecting every contributor to be aware that they need to make these types of changes that you are now harping over in the FOF files, as an example, then I disagree wholeheartedly with that stance. THAT is the level of detail that is the project's responsibility. It is already painful enough to contribute to Joomla, requiring legal review before every commit basically turns Joomla into more of a walled garden than it already is.

[mbabker]

And sorry for trying to ensure an unfair burden is not placed on contributors that does not exist anywhere except maybe in Google or Microsoft owned repositories.

[mbabker]

To the extent that you are appearing to suggest, yes.

[mbabker]

Personally, I take offense to the fact that you are trying to assign blame to specific individuals in #23867 as though every action by one of those individuals is one of willful malintent. You are trying to spin things around in a way that suggests every one of those individuals should have had their pull requests closed and banned from contributing until they can pass your expectations on familiarity with the GPL license. I don't know the license that in depth, I rely on others to help cover down on places where I don't know things. In the time it has taken this conversation to unfold, someone could have addressed your finger pointing by adding the requisite annotations to each file and been done with things, instead you aim to change the contribution workflow to one that says "I have passed an exam that certifies I understand the GNU General Public License, version 2, and that my contributions are of legal compliance with the text of the license".