changelog files are a much better indication of whom to liase with than
historic @Author tags, particularly as the project matures and the people
change.
James provides a page of credits where people can be publicly named and thanked which I believe is also more appropriate than @Author tags.
I think this is an excellent approach. Most people want to see their name 'in print', and use @author tags to do it, but then the issues of code ownership raise their ugly heads.
Having a separate credits page will solve that issue, and then any code-responsibility questions can be directed to those in the changelogs.
We have
also discussed the use of CVS keyword replacement "$id$" (is that right?) in
the @Author tag to at least identify the last comitter to work on a file.
The jury is out on the merit of that one, as it is carried into the released
javadocs, which may be problematic as the comitter may not be the actual
author of the changes.
I think that with a project where there are many developers and only a few commiters, having the commiter's ID doesn't really add much, but may be useful for checking why particular patches went through.
I would expect that any external (non-contributor) requests for help would
be better directed to the appropriate list and not the @Author, and likewise
I would also expect any responsible contributor to review the change log and
relevant commit logs for the code they are interested in if they want to
discuss issues with a specific previous author. Otherwise the normal means
of communication (dev- lists) can be used as normal.
Agree completely.
Alex.
