On Oct 2, 2005, at 12:22 AM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
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).
Sure, but not having an author tag doesn't take that away. I really
like them for newbies, but I also have no empirical evidence that
people contribute more eagerly with an author tag...
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.
Author tags don't actually solve that either when there are more than
one author. You still have to go look at the log.
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 :-)
They are very seductive, but I think can be a negative in the long term.
Being aggressive on recognizing the contributions on the contributor
page and AUTHOR files should balance the somewhat debatable theory
about newbies.
geir
-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.
--
Geir Magnusson Jr +1-203-665-6437
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
