Stian Soiland-Reyes created TAVERNA-897:
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Summary: Remove @author tags?
Key: TAVERNA-897
URL: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/TAVERNA-897
Project: Apache Taverna
Issue Type: Bug
Reporter: Stian Soiland-Reyes
Assignee: Stian Soiland-Reyes
Some of our Javadoc contain @author tags - which are reflected in the HTML of
the JAvadoc - for instance
http://taverna.incubator.apache.org/javadoc/taverna-language/org/apache/taverna/scufl2/api/package-summary.html
http://taverna.incubator.apache.org/javadoc/taverna-osgi/org/apache/taverna/configuration/ConfigurationManager.html
Apache NiFi's argument against Javadoc @author tags:
http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/incubator-nifi-dev/201505.mbox/%3CCAGHyZ6LcrZ1aPMUjJ%3DrJkkK19Cmveew7PmTUKuWprK_bz3jxmg%40mail.gmail.com%3E
– which I find myself agreeing with.
Older discussion also says Apache projects should stay away from @author tags:
https://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/www-community/200306.mbox/%[email protected]%3E
A simple argument is that under ASF all of the Taverna committers are equally
responsible or attributable for all the code base - even if a particular person
made a class to start with.
Maintenance of @author tag is error-prone (how big a change before you add
yourself? What about thousands of files with no @author?)
Also there's the question of what is the purpose of the @author tag beyond
attribution (it shows up in the HTML representation), when any questions about
a class should be taken to dev@taverna - not to that person.
The git log should provide attribution about who made a file, but sadly after
various folder/repository moves and version control system changes this is a
bit tricky (you need to use {{git log --follow}} and hope for the best). So
there is an counter-argument for keeping the @author tags - specially as coming
up in TAVERNA-894 lots of the classes of taverna-osgi and taverna-engine were
initially written by David Withers and Tom Oinn, and neither joined the Apache
Taverna project.
What are your views?
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