On Mon, Jan 20, 2003 at 09:21:42AM +0100, Nicola Ken Barozzi wrote: > > > Jeff Turner wrote: > >On Sun, Jan 19, 2003 at 11:34:32AM +0100, Nicola Ken Barozzi wrote: > > > >>I thought that this issue had been addressed, but I can't find the vote > >>results, if we had a vote. > >> > >>Thus, I'm asking to vote on this issue. > >> > >>Do you want that all @author tags and all reference to authors of source > >>code files be removed from the files themselves? The information about > >>the authors will still be present in commit messages and in the site > >>credits. > > > > > >I assume this is a majority vote.. > > > >-1. > > > >Author info is frequently useful. Code moves around, and CVS histories > >get lost. > > So? > > If a file is moved, or it's so new that the original author is working > on it, or it's so old that the community should have gotten hold of it, > hence there is no need to have that info anyway.
I didn't follow that. "If ...., or ..., or ...., hence ... " is not a sentence. > >Code gets copied into foreign (non-OSS) codebases. > > It's Apache code, the Apache license and a community author tag is enough. > > >Also, contributors get a kick out of seeing their name in lights. I > >remember I did, when I contributed my first OSS patch to Log4j (way back, > >before it migrated to Apache) and Ceki added my name to Category.java. > >It is a small - but to some - important piece of recognition we can give > >to contributors. > > This is another issue. We could decide that Avalon committers do not add > author tags but are part of the Avalon Project author tag, and that > instead external contributors do get recognition there. Yes, there are other ways of acknowledging contributions, but @author is the most natural and enduring. > >Besides, I believe we're all adult enough not to let @author tags get in > >the way of community code ownership. > > Why taks the risk? > > Moreover, given the above points, it seems that author tags are not > needed, and serve only for recognition. > In a community project recognition is not based on how many author tags > there are, so... Of course 'recognition' is proportional to how much one has contributed. That's what meritocracies are all about. This whole issue can be resolved by making a distinction between AUTHORS and OWNERS. All code has author(s). Broadly speaking, even codebases have authors. Steven is the author of Merlin. Paul is the author of AltRMI. But the Avalon community is the OWNER of Merlin and AltRMI. To anyone who has written code commercially, this distinction should be quite natural: "I wrote the code, by the company owns it". If we make this distinction between owners and authors, I see no reason to de-emphasise the fact that Avalon was written by individual PEOPLE, not some faceless Borg-like entity. --Jeff > -- > Nicola Ken Barozzi [EMAIL PROTECTED] > - verba volant, scripta manent - > (discussions get forgotten, just code remains) > --------------------------------------------------------------------- -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> For additional commands, e-mail: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
