I don't know anybody who goes to the trouble of reading the SVN logs,
Yes, you do. I completely and utterly rely on them instead of the
@author-tags to see what happened. The SVN logs say who approved the
code into the SVN, which means that that person is responsible for
the code. *Not* the patch submitter (which is what the @author
should say). Or are you implying that we should blindly accept code
which we don't understand and defer responsibility to random patch
submitters?
and
I think it's not realistic to think anybody who downloads and looks at
code is going to do so.
Yes, they will, if there are no @author-tags. And it's better to
target the mailing list anyway instead of particular people.
Case in point: The author of LuceneSearchProvider has not contributed
anything in what, two years? Yet he still stands in as the @author.
Would you go to him to ask for help, or should you go to the mailing
list?
It's not that @author identifies every contributor,
it identifies someone who knows what the code does, why it was
written,
and who is most likely to know how to fix or modify it. That is very
valuable information, even for Apache projects.
That is not true even for my own code.
really, really a bad idea to throw out metadata, even if it's not
*entirely* accurate (and for @author tags, I'd argue that within
limitations, they're largerly accurate for their intended purpose).
Well, I am going to remove my authorship from the code anyway, since
they mostly bother me instead of giving me any concrete benefits.
/Janne
