GNU Boot source code history


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Introduction

The GNU Boot project decided that it was a good thing to list all the contributors that modified a file in the copyright headers. There are many good reasons for that:

However in the main GNU Boot repository there are many files whose copyright headers are incomplete as they miss some of the contributors.

Since some of the files have a very long history that spans through multiple projects and repositories, we found the need to document the complex history of the GNU Boot source code.

In addition it would also be a good thing to go beyond just documenting the git and tarball releases history. For instance we lack the history of various projects somewhat related to Libreboot like retroboot, and we don’t have any documentation on their precise relationship with the Libreboot project either.

Researching all that ourselves is time consuming. So until now we tried to save what was useful for understanding the GNU Boot history without doing too much research (on the material) ourselves. Here are the pages we kept (and that we modified a bit to add more context):

Git history

Here’s a summary of the git history that is scattered across different repositories and projects:

And are the corresponding files to the image above:

Before Libreboot used git

Before using git, Libreboot was released as tarballs.

The commit cee90ae0fce6d6aee8d78969b60c952c8890abd6 in the

obsolete-repository-preserved-for-historical-purposes repository has more details on the first releases.

So far we know about these tarball releases before git:

Release date URL
1st release 20131212 https://rsync.libreboot.org/oldstable/20131212/X60_source.tar.gz
2nd release 20131213 https://rsync.libreboot.org/oldstable/20131213/X60_source.tar.gz
3rd release 20131214 https://rsync.libreboot.org/oldstable/20131214/X60_source.tar.gz
4th release 20140221 https://rsync.libreboot.org/oldstable/20140221/X60_source.tar.gz
5th release, first revision lost lost
5th release, second revision 20140622 https://rsync.libreboot.org/oldstable/20140622/libreboot_src.tar.gz
6th release, first beta 20140711 https://rsync.libreboot.org/oldstable/20140711/libreboot_src.tar.gz

The “6th release, first beta” is also available in git, but we don’t know yet if the git commit and the tarball are equivalent, so we included it as well.

Before the first Libreboot release

The first Libreboot release (20131212) also contains several git repositories that contains build scripts:

So some of the files present in GNU boot may or may not come from there.

And the gnutoo-for-coreboot repositories were made from scratch by GNUtoo.

Incomplete history

The history of the projects presented in this page is incomplete. So far we only have a partial code history. Contributions are welcome. See the contribute.html page about various ways to contribute to GNU Boot or to contact the project to update the information in this page.

Verified copyright headers

So far the copyright headers were verified on the following files:

Also note that some files are there to stay (like the grub.cfg file above) but since we took the decision to migrate packages to Guix, another way to help improve the copyright headers situation is to migrate packages to Guix and to make sure that the Guix packages have proper copyright headers.

Since we can add the path of verified files above, it is also possible to add files that never had any issues.

Some omissions can still manage to skip through code review after the verification but at least we have the proper git history that enables us to more easily reconstruct it.

Files with an incomplete copyright header

The following files have incomplete copyright headers:

Markdown file for this page: https://gnu.org/software/gnuboot/web/docs/history/index.md