On Thu, 2006-02-23 at 10:19, Ted Husted wrote: > 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.
fair enough. > > As to why, Greg Stein sums it up well here: > > * http://tinyurl.com/mw7t6 this is a total side note, but i also don't understand the tinyurl thing. > > 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. I think all of that sounds ideal, but isn't always reality. I think that with roller we do all of that stuff, but it doesn't change the fact that people tend to deliver focused pieces of functionality to the application and hence they tend to know that piece better than everyone else. I don't like the idea of a "primary maintainer" either, but we are a small project with only a small group of people contributing most of the code so it's inevitable that some parts of the code base are likely only truly maintained by one person. I don't really care that much about @author tags, so I'm fine with removing them. -- Allen > > -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.
