Carsten Ziegeler wrote:
Hi,
I noticed that we don't consistently use javadoc tags throughout our
code base. Some of them have author tags, others have version tags, some
have both, and a lot of them don't have any tags at all.
For the author tag: it's a suggestion from the ASF to not use author
tags for several reasons (they get out of date/sync, they might be
abused, they imply code ownership etc.). We've seen all this happen at
the ASF, so I suggest to simply remove them. If noone objects, I'll do
that. (the svn history contains exact information about who changed what)
Personally, I'm not really "attached" to the author tags, but I also agree with David Taylor that removing them just because they *could* be
abused doesn't sound like a good enough reason to me.
We (the PMC) are here to monitor and watch against things like that.
Furthermore, I don't recall this to be a formal ASF policy either, so its up to
each project to decide upon.
With that in mind, I think I prefer keeping the author tags for now, until we
(the PMC) formally decide otherwise.
I have no real opinion about the version tags, but as Ate told me these
are used by Jetspeed as well, so I think it makes sense to add them to
all Java source code. Again, if noone objects I'll add them as well.
Yes, we do use them in Jetspeed and I think the @version $Id$ tag really is a good help to determine what the exact origin is of a source
file at any time.
However, to make use of the subversion $Id$ keywords property requires each
(text) source file has this property set.
This depends on the developer to have its local subversion configuration setup
correctly which isn't always done right :)
So, to apply the version tag to all source files does require quit some effort.
I've used a custom shell script in the past against Jetspeed (setting the needed svn properties) which helps a lot, but adding the @version
tag is more difficult to automate. And there are still many source files in Jetspeed for which this hasn't been done.
If you are willing to do all that work for Pluto, you've got my +1 :)
But I don't consider this a *required* fix for the upcoming Pluto 2.0 release.
Regards,
Ate
WDYT?
Carsten
