Author Tags

[Garrett Rooney <ro...@electricjellyfish.net>]

In the spirit of tackling the potentially contentious subjects early
on, how do people feel about @author tags?

I know some developers are very attached to them, but personally I'm
not a big fan.  They tend to become less and less accurate as time
goes on (if you rewrite half a file, do you add your @author tag?  if
you rewrite the whole thing do you remove the initial one?), and they
encourage territoriality in the codebase that really doesn't have any
place in an open source project.  The only real purpose they serve is
to ensure that people get credit, and that is already taken care of by
other means, committers are listed on the project web site, and
contributors are acknowledged in commit logs and changelogs.

There's no hard and fast rule about such things at the ASF, projects
are free to do as they wish, so if people feel strongly we can
certainly leave them in, but I figured it was worth bringing up early
on, so if we decide to remove them we can do so now, before people get
used to having them around.

Thoughts?

-garrett

Re: Author Tags

[Paul Querna <ch...@force-elite.com>]

Garrett Rooney wrote:
> In the spirit of tackling the potentially contentious subjects early
> on, how do people feel about @author tags?
> 
> I know some developers are very attached to them, but personally I'm
> not a big fan.  They tend to become less and less accurate as time
> goes on (if you rewrite half a file, do you add your @author tag?  if
> you rewrite the whole thing do you remove the initial one?), and they
> encourage territoriality in the codebase that really doesn't have any
> place in an open source project.  The only real purpose they serve is
> to ensure that people get credit, and that is already taken care of by
> other means, committers are listed on the project web site, and
> contributors are acknowledged in commit logs and changelogs.
> 
> There's no hard and fast rule about such things at the ASF, projects
> are free to do as they wish, so if people feel strongly we can
> certainly leave them in, but I figured it was worth bringing up early
> on, so if we decide to remove them we can do so now, before people get
> used to having them around.
> 
> Thoughts?

I don't like them much, and like you said, all the information is 
present in other better places.

+1 to no @author tags.

-Paul

Re: Author Tags

[Garrett Rooney <ro...@electricjellyfish.net>]

On 7/11/06, Garrett Rooney <ro...@electricjellyfish.net> wrote:
> In the spirit of tackling the potentially contentious subjects early
> on, how do people feel about @author tags?
>
> I know some developers are very attached to them, but personally I'm
> not a big fan.  They tend to become less and less accurate as time
> goes on (if you rewrite half a file, do you add your @author tag?  if
> you rewrite the whole thing do you remove the initial one?), and they
> encourage territoriality in the codebase that really doesn't have any
> place in an open source project.  The only real purpose they serve is
> to ensure that people get credit, and that is already taken care of by
> other means, committers are listed on the project web site, and
> contributors are acknowledged in commit logs and changelogs.
>
> There's no hard and fast rule about such things at the ASF, projects
> are free to do as they wish, so if people feel strongly we can
> certainly leave them in, but I figured it was worth bringing up early
> on, so if we decide to remove them we can do so now, before people get
> used to having them around.
>
> Thoughts?

Ok, since consensus seems to be leaning towards getting rid of them
(and James is ok with it, and like 98% of the @author lines are his),
I just removed them in r421427.

If anybody objects feel free to roll it back.

-garrett

Re: Author Tags

[James M Snell <ja...@gmail.com>]

No feeling either way on 'em. Strip 'em if you'd like.

- James

Garrett Rooney wrote:
> In the spirit of tackling the potentially contentious subjects early
> on, how do people feel about @author tags?
> 
> I know some developers are very attached to them, but personally I'm
> not a big fan.  They tend to become less and less accurate as time
> goes on (if you rewrite half a file, do you add your @author tag?  if
> you rewrite the whole thing do you remove the initial one?), and they
> encourage territoriality in the codebase that really doesn't have any
> place in an open source project.  The only real purpose they serve is
> to ensure that people get credit, and that is already taken care of by
> other means, committers are listed on the project web site, and
> contributors are acknowledged in commit logs and changelogs.
> 
> There's no hard and fast rule about such things at the ASF, projects
> are free to do as they wish, so if people feel strongly we can
> certainly leave them in, but I figured it was worth bringing up early
> on, so if we decide to remove them we can do so now, before people get
> used to having them around.
> 
> Thoughts?
> 
> -garrett
>