by way of an amusing anecdote on this point, when I was managing the Unix servers at the MIT AI Lab in the mid 80's I got in a bit of a contest with RMS (richard stallman) about his liberal sharing of his login credentials with literally *anyone* that asked; one day i found about 100 incoming FTP sessions on his account, all coming from elsewhere, the world over; it had dragged down the network and the vax 750 host, so I decided to take drastic action (after having first asked him to desist, which he ignored); so i modified the code of the FTP server to refuse more than one connection on his account; the next day i found another 100 or so sessions, so I checked the FTP server code: my changes were gone, with a comment left in place "Glenn, don't bother changing this again... RMS"; at that point, i gave up, realizing we could just continue changing it back and forth to no end;
let's avoid that same problem here; g. p.s. incidentally, it was that same vax 750 that the very first "internet worm" was introduced to (by Robert Morris Jr) a few years later, in November, 1988; i guess that was an inevitable follow on... On Sat, Aug 28, 2010 at 5:42 PM, Glenn Adams <[email protected]> wrote: > for what it's worth, i don't have a strong opinion on this issue (i.e., > whether to use @asf.todo or TODO); i explained below why i made the original > change, and, yes, it was not discussed at the time; > > the point i was making below, which you echo, is that is indeed better to > first discuss a change that undoes a set of changes than to slip it by, > perhaps unnoticed; in the future, were i to be granted committer status, i > certainly would not want to simply commit a change that undoes the work of > another committer, at least without some discussion and consensus taking; > > g. > > > On Sat, Aug 28, 2010 at 4:51 PM, Simon Pepping <[email protected]>wrote: > >> It would indeed have been better to first have a discussion and then >> make the change. @asf.todo is specific enough that we could have >> changed it at any time. That said, Glenn's change was also made >> without a discussion. My javadoc does not complain about the @todo >> tag, and I had not understood that this was a motivation. >> >> The javadoc documentation (of my sun-java6-jdk) is not clear about >> this topic, and uses @todo liberally in its section about the -tag >> option. Its most informative paragraph is this: >> >> "Avoiding Conflicts - If you want to slice out your own namespace, you >> can use a dot-separated naming convention similar to that used for >> packages: com.mycompany.todo. Sun will continue to create standard >> tags whose names do not contain dots. Any tag you create will override >> the behavior of a tag by the same name defined by Sun. In other words, >> if you create a tag or taglet @todo, it will always have the same >> behavior you define, even if Sun later creates a standard tag of the >> same name." >> >> which does not even go so far as to discourage the @todo tag. It is >> also not clear how a todo tag would be a specific asf tag, different >> from the todo tag of any other organization. Everybody uses todo and >> means the same with it. >> >> Using the widely recognized TODO keyword circumvents the tag question >> altogether, but is outdated since the advent of tags. >> >> Let us discuss this and not waste effort on undoing each other's >> expression of their point of view. Let us also not forget that working >> in a team requires compromises; the code will never match your own >> conventions and preferences as precisely as code in your very own >> project. This is more so in an open project with a long history and a >> large set of authors. >> >> Simon >> >> On Sat, Aug 28, 2010 at 09:28:06AM +0800, Glenn Adams wrote: >> > Vincent, >> > >> > Could you explain your rationale for this change? Originally, these were >> all >> > marked with a non-standard '@todo' javadoc tag, which javadoc complained >> > about, indicating that for "non-standard" tags, there should be at least >> one >> > '.' present in the tag name. I had fixed this by adding the "asf." >> prefix, >> > which still allowed tracking these in javadoc more easily. However, your >> > change now removes the utility of the tag. >> > >> > On a more general point, wouldn't it be more useful to have a discussion >> > about stylistic changes prior to implementing them? Just so we can get >> on >> > the same page? >> > >> > Regards, >> > Glenn >> > >> > On Fri, Aug 27, 2010 at 9:31 PM, <[email protected]> wrote: >> > >> > > Author: vhennebert >> > > Date: Fri Aug 27 13:31:41 2010 >> > > New Revision: 990148 >> > > >> > > URL: http://svn.apache.org/viewvc?rev=990148&view=rev >> > > Log: >> > > Replaced @asf.todo with normal TODO comment >> > > >> > > >> >> -- >> Simon Pepping >> home page: http://www.leverkruid.eu >> > >
