Glynn Foster writes: > On Fri, 2006-01-06 at 09:34 -0500, James Carlson wrote: > > I still think it looks rather cheesy. First of all, there's the plain > > old clutter problem. I wasn't thrilled with the excess of the CDDL > > language (the original two-line copyright notice, though slightly > > annoying, was comparatively short and sweet), but a long list of > > "brought to you by" attributions would just be downright obnoxious. > > Hrm, I don't think it's hugely obnoxious seeing one or two people in > some sort of Authors section - in fact I think it's pretty helpful to > see where the original motivation came from. I'm certainly not > suggesting having 100's and 100's of people. But then this is probably > not 95% of the contributions will be.
That's a problem, because most useful code ends up being maintained by a fair number of people over the long haul, and this quickly becomes page after page of "Kilroy was here." I understand that special legal notices are a necessary evil, and that when there's a contribution or component that has an explicit need for attribution, we've just got no choice no matter how ugly it is in practice, but I don't think we should be otherwise trying to determine who gets his name in source code lights and who doesn't. It's gratuitious and really doesn't help anyone understand the code any better. Helpful things include references to books or papers that cover the algorithms, diagrams showing related data structures, lists of members protected by locks, and other references to the code itself. It doesn't help me in the least to know that [EMAIL PROTECTED] thought that 7 was a good number of bytes to allocate. It helps even less to know that ucbvax!harvard!bob thought more testing was needed. I honestly don't care. > No disagreement there. However, interestingly, it does create some sense > of the fact that there are real people actually writing this code. May > not be useful to the code, or desireable, but it does have certain > merits in a different light. I still disagree. I do agree that we should recognize contributors. Perhaps have a web page listing contributors and the number of lines of changes written. And special awards or recognition for folks who *DELETE* lines of code. I just don't agree that this needs to clutter the source code itself. > > I think of this as being similar to littering the code with "#ifdef > > notyet", "/* XXX broken */", "/* bugid 1234 */", or "/* [EMAIL PROTECTED] > > changed this to 7 */" trash. If it's not known to be right and isn't > > actually used in the running system, yank it out. It doesn't belong. > > Hrm, again I probably disagree with some of that - where things are > known to be broken, it's a useful reminder. And goodness knows we all > commit code that we know breaks for certain edge cases due to time > constraints, laziness or other conditions. I believe having those > reminders in the code is definitely better than lost in some putback > logs, IMHO. Those are very good reasons _not_ to type "putback" in the first place. And when they're found, they're very good reasons to file bugs! -- James Carlson, KISS Network <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sun Microsystems / 1 Network Drive 71.232W Vox +1 781 442 2084 MS UBUR02-212 / Burlington MA 01803-2757 42.496N Fax +1 781 442 1677 _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
