At 01:24 08.06.2001 -0700, Craig R. McClanahan wrote: >I think this is really a significant question. How significant a patch >does it take for someone to legitimately be considered an additional >"author" of a particular source file? Attribution in a CVS commit should >always be there -- but is that really enough. > >Unfortunately, I don't have time at the moment to come up with ideas for a >document describing reasonable policies for making such a decision -- but >it would be useful to have such a thing (i.e. I vote +0 :-). The rule I use is to be liberal when granting authorship but extremely conservative in removing authorship. Ten lines of new code turns a contributor to an author for the relevant file. In some rather rare cases, small (< 5 lines) but insightful changes can have a big impact. Consequently they merit authorship and even committer status. In principle, authorship can never be removed regardless of how much one changes the original code. After 65 iterations it might well be the case that not one single lines survives from the original code. That still does not justify the removal of the original author's name. On the other hand, authorship is not viral. If someone creates a new class extending a class that I wrote, that does not make me an author of the extending class. I religiously follow these rules and expect everyone else in the log4j community to do the same. Regards, Ceki --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
