Am Fr, den 27.02.2004 schrieb Tim Larson um 16:25: > On Fri, Feb 27, 2004 at 11:33:32AM +0100, Dirk-Willem van Gulik wrote: > > On Feb 27, 2004, at 12:45 AM, Conal Tuohy wrote: > > > > >I don't think the ASF should discourage developers from keeping useful > > >metadata about the code inside the source files. What better place to > > >put the metadata than in the code? This makes it more likely to be > > >used and kept up to date than if it was stored somewhere else, IMHO. > > > > One way to look at this is that @author tags are in a way factually > > 'wrong'; in most cases it just signals which person wrote the first > > skeleton of that code; but subsequently it was fixes, peer-reviewed and > > looked at by a whole community. Also do not forget the many people in > > your community which help with QA, Documentation, user-feedback and so > > on. To put one person in the (hot) seat for what is essentially a > > group effort is not quite right. > > > > Looking through the CVS logs of a few tomcat files: each block of 30 > > lines seems to have had commits of at least 5 persons; with a median of > > 6 and an average of 9. The average number of @author tags on those > > arbitrary blocks is about 0.5. And that is not counting QA, docs, > > suggestions of mailing lists, bug resolutions, user support. I.e. those > > things which make tomcat such a great supported product.
Searching the CVS logs for an author is nonsense, since the history get lost if we move the files around or create new repositories, like we do in the past. And the CHANGES are not really complete. Using AUTHOR tags in the source files is a good practice, IMHO. -1, Stephan.
