Might as well do this, now that we are getting in code by the bucketful.
One of the fundamental notions of an Apache project is the notion of
community ownership - that this is _our_ project, collectively.
However, this collective project is composed of significant
individual contributions, contributions which we want to recognize.
So the problem we have to solve is how to balance these two ideas.
The Apache Board has recommended that projects not employ author tags
in their source code. The main motivation for this recommendation is
to remove "territorial ownership" from code.
I've worked in projects that did it, and some that didn't. When tags
were there, I think it gave people a chance to 'sign' their work, and
I'll be the first to admit that when I did my first-ever commit that
had my name on it, I was proud! It's a natural thing to be proud of
our work. The flip side was that I've seen it lead to people
believing they "own" a piece of code because of the tags, I've seen
"keeping up with the joneses" where every contributor adds an author
tag, no matter what, leading to strange feelings about what is the
level that makes on an "author".... For example, reformatting w/
eclipse?
When we started Geronimo, we decided to not use author tags, and
we've never looked back - it just didn't matter.
Now, if you look around the foundation codebases, there are author
tags historically, and some projects just chose to ignore the
recommendation and use them.
My preference is to not have them here in Apache Harmony, but that
said, I want to make sure that contributors are recognized for both
general participation as well as significant 'bulk' contributions.
To solve that, I can think of two things offhand :
1) We should have a page like the HTTP project (you know, the "Apache
webserver")
http://httpd.apache.org/contributors/
where we have a list of our committers and their ongoing activities,
and a section noting the contributions that the project accepted.
2) In order to get attribution closer to the code, we could also have
an "AUTHORS" file per module, so that we'd easily know who is working
on what - if you are a committer working on a module, you'd add your
name to the list. Additionally, if there was a bulk contribution
that seeded a module (like the three contribs we have now), we can
have a note about that at the top of the AUTHORS file such as
"ArchieVM originally contributed by Archie Cobbs" (yeah, I know we
aren't calling it ArchieVM...) or something like that.
Thoughts?
geir
--
Geir Magnusson Jr +1-203-665-6437
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
