[jira] [Commented] (TAVERNA-897) Remove @author tags?

["Stian Soiland-Reyes (JIRA)" <ji...@apache.org>]

    [ https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/TAVERNA-897?page=com.atlassian.jira.plugin.system.issuetabpanels:comment-tabpanel&focusedCommentId=15978316#comment-15978316 ] 

Stian Soiland-Reyes commented on TAVERNA-897:
---------------------------------------------

I agree with [~stuzart] that it's a shame the git history is not immediately complete.  This is an artifact of several restructuring and infrastructure changes:

* One large CVS at SourceForge
* Single large SVN at Google Code (with various reorganizations to different branches/tags/trunks structures)
* hundreds of git repositories at github.com/taverna  (one for each tags/trunks/branches parent as of Taverna 2.5)
* merged staging repositories at github.com/taverna-incubating (with `old/*`  tags per original git repo)
* incubator-taverna-* git repositories at apache.org (mirrored to github.com/apache) -- includes above tags

There's a snapshot of the SVN history at https://github.com/taverna/taverna-svn

So the history is there, but you have to hunt around, e.g. using git log --follow on an individual file to track it across file renames.   It's also there in the complete "git log" - but with various usernames - see for instance https://github.com/apache/incubator-taverna-workbench/commit/ab5112523a33abce6744680a64a2ec03b2f17a17 by `stuart@mygrid.org.uk`.

Adding your historic email addresses to your GitHub account will help to link it up there - as long as you can still confirm the email! 

Yet still the SVN history suffers from the same rename-problem (across larger SVN folders) and is cut short early unless you dig deep - which is not something prospective employers would bother to do.

We should also recognize strongly the effort by previous contributors like David Withers, Tom Oinn.

Maven has a [{{<developers>}}|https://github.com/apache/incubator-taverna-maven-parent/blob/master/pom.xml#L71] mechanism - putting this in incubator-taverna-maven-parent is semantically better in the Apache Way I guess, as it shouldn't matter to which git repository (if any) you have contributed to. But if we are to extend this list to include all contributors since 2005 we have a bigger job ahead..

If we add say a README in each git repository, that is easier to show to external, but also harder to maintain. It would also be then a prominent part of the download, which might not be quite the Apache Way..


> Remove @author tags?
> --------------------
>
>                 Key: TAVERNA-897
>                 URL: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/TAVERNA-897
>             Project: Apache Taverna
>          Issue Type: Bug
>            Reporter: Stian Soiland-Reyes
>            Assignee: Stian Soiland-Reyes
>
> Some of our Javadoc contain @author tags - which are reflected in the HTML of the JAvadoc - for instance
> http://taverna.incubator.apache.org/javadoc/taverna-language/org/apache/taverna/scufl2/api/package-summary.html
> http://taverna.incubator.apache.org/javadoc/taverna-osgi/org/apache/taverna/configuration/ConfigurationManager.html
> Apache NiFi's argument against Javadoc @author tags: http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/incubator-nifi-dev/201505.mbox/%3CCAGHyZ6LcrZ1aPMUjJ%3DrJkkK19Cmveew7PmTUKuWprK_bz3jxmg%40mail.gmail.com%3E – which I find myself agreeing with. 
> Older discussion also says Apache projects should stay away from @author tags:
> https://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/www-community/200306.mbox/%3C20030609234538.GA22335@lyra.org%3E
> A simple argument is that under ASF all of the Taverna committers are equally responsible or attributable for all the code base - even if a particular person made a class to start with.  
> Maintenance of @author tag is error-prone (how big a change  before you add yourself? What about thousands of files with no @author?)
> Also there's the question of what is the purpose of the @author tag beyond attribution (it shows up in the HTML representation), when any questions about a class should be taken to dev@taverna - not to that person.
> The git log should provide attribution about who made a file, but sadly after various folder/repository moves and version control system changes this is a bit tricky (you need to use {{git log --follow}} and hope for the best). So there is an counter-argument for keeping the @author tags - specially as coming up in TAVERNA-894 lots of the classes of taverna-osgi and taverna-engine were initially written by David Withers and Tom Oinn, and neither joined the Apache Taverna project. 
> What are your views?



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