Glen Mazza wrote: > Victor, > > Rather than burden the team page with the name of each > person who has contributed source code to FOP, I think > it would be better for us to continue to keep their > names in the source file, albeit outside of the > @author attribute tag.
I really hate to be arguing all of the time, but I don't see the "burden". If we were paying for web space by the word, then maybe you have a point. Otherwise, I don't think it is too much to acknowledge those who have contributed to the product. > I had understood the vote as for us not using the > @author attribution for source files--in short, that > our FOP JavaDoc won't be listing individual committer > and contributor names. That's a clean design for our > JavaDocs, which I agreed with. > > But even though the vote was probably to remove *all* > author comments, @author or not (which is also fine, > after all, the committers themselves rarely put their > names on any files), it was not "to remove all author > credits *and* add them to the team page." It also was not to "remove all author credits and make enhancements to the RTF Renderer", but we've done some of that, haven't we? There are quite a few things that don't require a vote. However, I interpret your comments above to now be a proposal to remove such credits from the team page, which can, of course, be voted on. -1 > Indeed, I don't know of any other Apache group that > maintains a "former contributors" section instead of > comments in the source files--and I'm reluctant for us > to open that can of worms--especially as this will > soon grow to dozens of names (look at the AWT classes, > for example). I'm glad to acknowledge all of them, even if there are hundreds. > Simple non-JavaDoc comments near the top of a source > file that indicate its original contributor are not > that bad, actually the right thing to do. (It's also > what jfor apparently does--see the Team section at: > http://www.jfor.org/) In those cases where we're > concerned about the contributor's work getting > "erased", then this is probably the cleaner route. You may be correct about the intent, but I doubt it. The default for javadoc is to ignore the @author tags. Therefore, I think that the intent was to not clutter the source code with author attributions at all. IMO, it would be *much* cleaner to use the @author tag than any other method within the source code. However, none of this was really of much interest to me, so perhaps those who really cared about it would comment. Victor Mote
