[Discussion+proposal] Removal of @author tags and making contributions visible

[Vincent Massol <vm...@pivolis.com>]

Hi,

As you may know we have removed the @author tags in source files. This
is to follow the ASF board recommendation. However that removes the
indication of who "contributed" to what piece of code.

Fortunately we have several other mechanisms to make contributions
visible to all:

1/ CVS commit logs
2/ mailing list archives
3/ bugzilla issues
4/ contributor's page
(http://jakarta.apache.org/cactus/participating/contributors.html)
5/ changes.xml file
(http://jakarta.apache.org/cactus/changes.html#release_changes).
Whenever we (Cactus committers) make a change on behalf of someone else
we indicate it in this file.

What do Cactus contributors think?
 
Is this enough? 

What I was thinking was to move the contributor's page
(http://jakarta.apache.org/cactus/participating/contributors.html) to
our Wiki (http://wiki.apache.org/jakarta-cactus) so that it could be
more easily edited and more importantly contributors could edit it
themselves adding what they are participating in/etc, so that it
reflects better the reality. I feel that our contributors's page does
not completely reflect the reality.

What do you think?

Another solution would be to have some magic tool that would
automatically extract statistical information from:
- CVS
- mailing list
- bugzilla
and extract contributor with their contributions from this. That would
probably be very nice but I don't know of such tool... 

So I'd say it's probably enough to open up the contributor's page using
our wiki for now.

Comments?

Thanks

-Vincent
Wanna see JUnit in Action?
(http://manning.com/massol)


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Re: [Discussion+proposal] Removal of @author tags and making contributions visible

[Christopher Lenz <cm...@gmx.de>]

Am 13.03.2004 um 17:50 schrieb Vincent Massol:
> As you may know we have removed the @author tags in source files. This
> is to follow the ASF board recommendation. However that removes the
> indication of who "contributed" to what piece of code.
>
> Fortunately we have several other mechanisms to make contributions
> visible to all:
>
> 1/ CVS commit logs
> 2/ mailing list archives
> 3/ bugzilla issues
> 4/ contributor's page
> (http://jakarta.apache.org/cactus/participating/contributors.html)
> 5/ changes.xml file
> (http://jakarta.apache.org/cactus/changes.html#release_changes).
> Whenever we (Cactus committers) make a change on behalf of someone else
> we indicate it in this file.
>
> What do Cactus contributors think?
>
> Is this enough?

IMHO, yes. Every contributor should get credit in the change log, which 
also describes what area the contribution was directed at. More 
frequent or larger contributions (or contributions that don't involve 
actual code) should be credited through the contributors page.

> What I was thinking was to move the contributor's page
> (http://jakarta.apache.org/cactus/participating/contributors.html) to
> our Wiki (http://wiki.apache.org/jakarta-cactus) so that it could be
> more easily edited and more importantly contributors could edit it
> themselves adding what they are participating in/etc, so that it
> reflects better the reality. I feel that our contributors's page does
> not completely reflect the reality.
>
> What do you think?

Maybe we just need to take more care in updating the contributors page 
timely.

I think a Wiki page is not a good solution. The contributors page 
stored in CVS is much more "authoritative", and it is included with 
every release (which a Wiki page is obviously not).

Cheers,
Chris
--
Christopher Lenz
/=/ cmlenz at gmx.de


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