Martin van den Bemt wrote:
Jonathan Revusky wrote:
Nathan Bubna wrote:
In general, I wonder about the whole psychology behind the removal of
@author tags. After all, the technical/pragmatic arguments in favor of
removal strike me as extremely weak. So it has me wondering, what are
the *real* reasons that prophets of the so-called "Apache Way" are so
adamant about removing @author tags? (And that's not a purely rhetorical
question. I pose the question because I really don't know. OTOH, I don't
really expect a forthright honest response to this from any of those
poeple... :-))
Assuming you are really interested (even though I read the whole thread, could
be interesting for
other people too) :
1) author tags imply ownership.
False. I explained why in the previous note.
2) author tags impose a barrier on working on code
Clearly false. I grant that it is not *always* all that useful to know
who wrote something. BUT... it is at least *somewhat* useful *sometimes*
to know who wrote a piece of code. So, some of the time it's useful and
some of the time it's not, but it never imposes a barrier per se.
If you are afraid of stepping on somebody's toes by modifying code they
wrote, you will have that fear whether or not there is an @author tag,
because you know that somebody did write it, and your modifications
could tee them off -- independently of whether there is an @author tag
or not. At least, the @author tag potentially gives you the information
of who to talk to, to see if they mind you mucking with what they did.
(although that's less of a problem at Velocity,
it is a problem on other projects)
3) Most author tags are *not* representative of people that have been working
on the code.
I don't get it. You mean, people put author tags on code they didn't write?
4) It's not fair to just give attribution to people who code, there are also
people that don't work
on the code that are part of the Velocity community.
<ROTFL>
Ah, this is one of the kinds of gems that make participating in
conversations with you people so much of a treasure... Priceless... You
are surpassing yourselves today. The above is an absolute gem of a
fallacy. An absolutely pathetically fallacious argument.
Martin, there is nothing about having @author tags in the code that
precludes giving non-coders credit (elsewhere in the appropriate places)
for their contributions to a project.
It's true that if I don't write any code, I don't get to put an @author
tag on any code, because I'm not the author of any of it. But is there
anything inherently "unfair" about that?
Now, if I make other kinds of contributions, like I work on
documentation materials, and I don't get any attribution for that, that
may be unfair, but that's a separate issue; it doesn't mean that the
presence of @author tags in the code is unfair....
<sigh>
5) Main reason to have author tags is giving attribution to the user who supply
patches, which can
easily be solved having a CONTRIBUTORS file.
Congrats, I think you're batting a perfect score here. The above
statement (5) is clearly false as well. The main reason for an @author
tag is so you know who wrote a given thing. A CONTRIBUTORS file does not
serve the same purpose. It simply gives somebody credited for having
done something or other, but you don't actually see what it was.
So a CONTRIBUTORS file does not serve the same purpose as @author tags.
Also, since you brought up fairness, it is potentially pretty unfair.
Anybody who patched a single line of code somewhere in a project, or did
*something* presumably gets added to a CONTRIBUTORS file and meanwhile,
a guy who redesigns and refactors the entire codebase, say, is also in a
CONTRIBUTORS file? In point (4) you express issues of fairness,
equitability. Isn't this a bit inconsistent? Aren't you concerned about
the potential inequitability of what you propose in point (5)?
Jonathan Revusky
--
lead developer, FreeMarker project, http://freemarker.org/
Mvgr,
Martin
---------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
