In message <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, Greg Stein writes: >"ownership". Eliminating author tags is yet another tool to avoid those >disruptive notions. Sure... if somebody is really gung ho on "owning" code, >then any tool you use isn't going to help. But the hope is that people like ... >Serge Knystautas defined a good policy for handling the recognition of >contributors: > > http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=james-dev&m=103898649308900&w=2
Although I agree with the conclusion, I disagree with the reasons. Whether it's author tags or change logs, the reason you list names is to maintain accountability, not to give credit. The justification given in the mail you reference in effect buys into the code ownership mentality by asserting that developers "deserve recoginition." The way I've always looked at it is that developers have the responsibility to be accountable for their work. The reason I've come to agree that author tags aren't particularly useful is because they don't provide a sufficiently fine grained indication of accountability, which is what the revision control log provides. Accountability just means that you have a responsibility to help resolve any future issues that may arise from your commits, even if it's just answering a question like "I don't understand how that method you added to rev 1.12 of class Foo 7 months ago works. Can you explain it to me so I can make this change?" Anyway, that's my possibly misguided take on the Apache Way: it's not recognition that matters, but responsibility. daniel
