Hi All,

Currently there are a lot of @author tags in MyFaces code, and I see
that they are still being added to (at least some) new files.

Should this be normal, or should they be phased out?

I'm in favour of getting rid of them. I don't mean any disrespect to
those people who did a lot of hard work (esp in the early days) on
MyFaces. However in many of the files, the @author tag credits one
person when the majority of the file contents have actually been
rewritten by half-a-dozen other people over the lifetime of that file.
And as MyFaces gets older, this applies more and more.

There are some files I could point to where I am actually the author of
the majority of the code yet someone else is in the @author tag. I don't
want to clutter this stuff with my name, but it's not entirely fair for
one person to remain as the only author marked for the file either.
(maybe not fair on them, as they take the blame for my **** code :-)

In the end these tags add zero benefit to the actual source.

I would prefer to give credit to people in some other way, eg via a
"myfaces history" page on the website, or maybe some kind of svn commit
report, rather than clutter the source with these tags. We do have the
"committers/contributors" report but that is not particularly fair or
prominent, and it would be nice to do better.

BTW, the Apache commons project chose to get rid of author tags several
years ago..

Opinions?

Regards,
Simon

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