The topic of author tags has been discussed in literally hundreds of ASF posts on various mailing lists. In the end, the ASF board determined that removing the tags is a "best practice", but it is not a requirement.
As to why, Greg Stein sums it up well here: * http://tinyurl.com/mw7t6 As to "who to contact first", any and all development conversations should happen on a mailing list. We should not contact each other about code, we should go through the list. If the topic is "sensitive" for some reason, then we can use the PMC list instead, at least until we get past the sensitive bits. But it is a very bad practice for one committer to email another with a question about code. The ASF considers the mailing lists to be our communal memory. We want the entire decision making process to happen over the lists so that it is made part of the ASF archives. That's one reason why all the commits, and issue ticket postings, and wiki changes, are all funnelled through the mailing lists. (I think another TODO may be to configure JIRA to post changes to [EMAIL PROTECTED]) As to the idea of a "primary maintainer", while things like that happen, it's not an idea that the ASF encourages. Every member of the PMC is jointly and severally responsible for all of the code. No PMC member needs another member's permission to make a change, and any PMC member can veto a change on technical grounds. (Which is why we are careful about who we invite to be a committer.) Once the code is committed to the repository and donated to the ASF, it belongs to all of us, and we all the authors now. -Ted. On 2/23/06, Allen Gilliland <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > I am still a bit confused as to why this is a best practice. > > I actually like having the @author tags so that I can know who "maintains" > that piece of code. To me it's not about giving credit it's more about > responsibility and it helps me to know who owns what pieces of code so that > if I have questions about it I know who to contact first. I am not > particularly tied to the @author javdoc markup if we don't want the author to > show up in our javadocs, but I do like having that indication somewhere in > the file. > > I feel that svn doesn't do quite as good a job of that because often times > commit notes are not very specific and even if the last few commits are from > user XXX that doesn't mean that XXX is the primary maintainer of that code. > I also think it's more of a pain to go back and lookup svn commit logs versus > just seeing the @author tag in the code.
