At 05:19 AM 3/12/2004, you wrote:
> Love yah, Roland, but this is not your shining hour.
Actually Roland shines when it comes to giving feedback to proposed changes, patches, answering questions, and helping people on the mailing. He is precisely the reason I (as a HttpClient project committer) would like to have a better attribution structure that goes beyond @author tag. The @author may be a very misleading indicator of one's contribution and its value. Roland contribution is currently MASSIVELY understated within the existing attribution structure. As much as I would regret to see @author go, at the same time I would whole-heartedly welcome a better system of giving due credits to the regular contributors like Roland. If the board comes up with viable substitution to the @author tag, so be it
Oleg
-----Original Message----- From: Michael McGrady [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Friday, March 12, 2004 13:38 To: Commons HttpClient Project Subject: Re: @author tags
Roland Weber wrote:
>I don't see that either. But if some of the top Apache guys >feel, believe or know otherwise, that's good enough for me.
Know what? This has become a recreation of illusions and delusions. This
is like Franz Kafka's book The Trial. There are vague and unsubstantiated
reasons for changing the entire attribution structure of the open source
community. This is not good thinking.
>If the only purpose of the tags is to feature contributor names >in a prominent place - namely the source code - then the >real question becomes whether we can achieve this goal >in some other way with reasonable effort.
This is NOT the only goal. That is not even close to accurate.
>Concerning the CVS log, you have to be aware that the >committer is not always the contributor. A contributor >may put a patch in bugzilla, which is then comitted by >someone else.
Well, in the paranoid sort of talk we are having, then the "committer"
becomes subject to these imagined but unreal legal assaults. Indeed, where
an "author" is hidden, the Foundation would become liable for a
"conspiracy" of hiding the real culprits. This is all silly from a legal
standpoint.
>In general, I don't believe that the removal of author tags >is to disguise from where the code came. Rather, some >people may be afraid to find their name in the author tag >of code which has no longer anything to do with what >they actually contributed long ago.
This is yet another reason? This is also not right. The @author tags keep
track of rather than obscure people's relation to existing code. The
destruction of this useful device will create rather than solve anything
akin to this imagined problem.
>Then it would become >their problem to dig through the CVS logs, bugzilla, and >the mailing list archives to prove that they are *not* the >author.
To whom? This is just imaginary. This is Alice in Wonderland thinking.
Love yah, Roland, but this is not your shining hour. Really, there is no
legal difficulty, but this recommendation might create one. Microsoft
could not have come up with a better way to screw up the code.
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