Ate Douma wrote: > Carsten Ziegeler wrote: >> Hi, >> >> I noticed that we don't consistently use javadoc tags throughout our >> code base. Some of them have author tags, others have version tags, some >> have both, and a lot of them don't have any tags at all. >> >> For the author tag: it's a suggestion from the ASF to not use author >> tags for several reasons (they get out of date/sync, they might be >> abused, they imply code ownership etc.). We've seen all this happen at >> the ASF, so I suggest to simply remove them. If noone objects, I'll do >> that. (the svn history contains exact information about who changed what) > > Personally, I'm not really "attached" to the author tags, but I also > agree with David Taylor that removing them just because they *could* be > abused doesn't sound like a good enough reason to me. > We (the PMC) are here to monitor and watch against things like that. > Furthermore, I don't recall this to be a formal ASF policy either, so > its up to each project to decide upon. > With that in mind, I think I prefer keeping the author tags for now, > until we (the PMC) formally decide otherwise. Ok, as I said it is not an official policy it's a suggestion which is some years old; I didn't find any pointers. Now, just look at some of our author tags and you can already see that some of them are plainly out dated or wrong. And finally, we had this discussion two years ago and before (I couldn't find all the pointers as searching through the mailing list archives is a pain). The last time was in march 2007 with the result that I removed author tags from Pluto - and now we have them back in in some source files. If author tags are maintained properly and applied to all source files I'm fine with leaving them in; but as this is not the case and as we agreed a long time ago for Pluto to remove them, I really think we should remove them.
Carsten -- Carsten Ziegeler [email protected]
