Eclipse files, @author and attributions

[Stian Soiland-Reyes <st...@apache.org>]

Just some personal views below.. :-)


I noticed again that git contains .classpath, .project and .settings
from Eclipse.

This is not generally done in Maven projects at ASF I've come across,
mainly because there will be frequent cross-developer cross-machine
"conflicts" in such files. With the m2eclipse plugin now built into
Eclipse it is also now just as easy to use "Import from Existing Maven
project" than to use "Import existing project" (which would recreate
those files based on pom.xml).

However this would make it harder to share the codestyle templates
etc. without moving to checkstyle or similar.

There are of course also other IDEs - ASF projects would generally be
neutral about what editor people should use.


Do I understand that the project has decided to include the Eclipse
files in git? I couldn't find it in the list archive.


The .settings include a template which hard-codes the @author to James Bognar:

stain@biggiebuntu:/tmp/juneau-rc2/git/juneau-microservice/.settings$
grep -ri salesfor .
...
id\="org.eclipse.jdt.ui.text.codetemplates.typecomment"
name\="typecomment">/**\n * TODO\n * <p>\n * \n * @author James
Bognar (james.bognar@salesforce.com)\n * ${tags}\n



Now generally ASF projects don't use @author tags as it seems to imply
file "ownership".

If there are attributions to be retained from before moving into the
incubator (which I would encourage), that should better be added to
the README or NOTICE file - this would presumably include both IBM and
Salesforce to cover their pre-2016 copyright?


Some of the threads discussing  @author tags in favour of version
control logs and public recognition of contributors:


https://lists.apache.org/thread.html/01830e9defb7fe93c6c105e4b3baefbe6d3437f596f7ca242629462b@1430691460@%3Cdev.nifi.apache.org%3E

https://lists.apache.org/thread.html/140c54bc6e09e70e9d1b2fa93960dfed2d489495347bc3bd10a43387@1055154205@%3Ccommunity.apache.org%3E

(and myself: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/TAVERNA-897 )


Still up to each ASF project, no hard rules here - although perhaps
there could be questions asked about impartiality or third-party
endorsement if every Juneau file says @author someone@salesforce.com -
(someone@apache.org would be neutral)


-- 
Stian Soiland-Reyes
http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9842-9718