Hi, Our codebase, and the https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/TIKA-6 patch contains lots of @author tags, do we really want them?
The general consensus in the ASF projects that I know is to *not* use those tags, to prevent people from contacting the authors directly for support (we want questions to go through our lists), and also because they tend to become stale as the code gets reworked. The alternative is to acknowledge contributions in commit messages and change logs. For larger contributions (like now, the vast majority of our code was written by Rida Benjelloun), we might create an additional CREDITS.txt file to make sure those are acknowledged properly. Saying "Rida contributed most of our initial code in 2007" there stays true forever, whatever happens to the code. WDYT? -Bertrand
