I prefer them. I've never had any of the problems that happened in
Avalon or other projects in any project I've been involved in. Author
tags do not signify ownership, they signify "I wuz here". They are also
a principle reason that a lot of newbies get involved in open source
because they can point potential employers to look at code that they
wrote (I know a few of this).
They also make it WAY more convienient to say "Hey andy why did you do
this dumb thing here?" rather than have to figure out who did that dumb
thing.
I do recommend omitting email addresses as those just help spammers and
tend to create useless name change commits.
I'm also the most guilty offender of forgetting to include my @author
tag on projects that require it :-)
-Andy
Geir Magnusson Jr. wrote:
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
--
Andrew C. Oliver
SuperLink Software, Inc.
Java to Excel using POI
http://www.superlinksoftware.com/services/poi
Commercial support including features added/implemented, bugs fixed.
