On Oct 2, 2005, at 12:22 AM, acoliver@apache.org wrote:
> I prefer them. I've never had any of the problems that happened in
> Avalon or other projects in any project I've been involved in.
> Author tags do not signify ownership, they signify "I wuz here".
> They are also a principle reason that a lot of newbies get involved
> in open source because they can point potential employers to look
> at code that they wrote (I know a few of this).
>
Sure, but not having an author tag doesn't take that away. I really
like them for newbies, but I also have no empirical evidence that
people contribute more eagerly with an author tag...
> They also make it WAY more convienient to say "Hey andy why did you
> do this dumb thing here?" rather than have to figure out who did
> that dumb thing.
Author tags don't actually solve that either when there are more than
one author. You still have to go look at the log.
>
> I do recommend omitting email addresses as those just help spammers
> and tend to create useless name change commits.
>
> I'm also the most guilty offender of forgetting to include my
> @author tag on projects that require it :-)
>
They are very seductive, but I think can be a negative in the long term.
Being aggressive on recognizing the contributions on the contributor
page and AUTHOR files should balance the somewhat debatable theory
about newbies.
geir
> -Andy
>
>
> Geir Magnusson Jr. wrote:
>
>> Might as well do this, now that we are getting in code by the
>> bucketful.
>> One of the fundamental notions of an Apache project is the notion
>> of community ownership - that this is _our_ project,
>> collectively. However, this collective project is composed of
>> significant individual contributions, contributions which we want
>> to recognize. So the problem we have to solve is how to balance
>> these two ideas.
>> The Apache Board has recommended that projects not employ author
>> tags in their source code. The main motivation for this
>> recommendation is to remove "territorial ownership" from code.
>> I've worked in projects that did it, and some that didn't. When
>> tags were there, I think it gave people a chance to 'sign' their
>> work, and I'll be the first to admit that when I did my first-
>> ever commit that had my name on it, I was proud! It's a natural
>> thing to be proud of our work. The flip side was that I've seen
>> it lead to people believing they "own" a piece of code because of
>> the tags, I've seen "keeping up with the joneses" where every
>> contributor adds an author tag, no matter what, leading to
>> strange feelings about what is the level that makes on an
>> "author".... For example, reformatting w/ eclipse?
>> When we started Geronimo, we decided to not use author tags, and
>> we've never looked back - it just didn't matter.
>> Now, if you look around the foundation codebases, there are
>> author tags historically, and some projects just chose to ignore
>> the recommendation and use them.
>> My preference is to not have them here in Apache Harmony, but
>> that said, I want to make sure that contributors are recognized
>> for both general participation as well as significant 'bulk'
>> contributions. To solve that, I can think of two things offhand :
>> 1) We should have a page like the HTTP project (you know, the
>> "Apache webserver")
>> http://httpd.apache.org/contributors/
>> where we have a list of our committers and their ongoing
>> activities, and a section noting the contributions that the
>> project accepted.
>> 2) In order to get attribution closer to the code, we could also
>> have an "AUTHORS" file per module, so that we'd easily know who
>> is working on what - if you are a committer working on a module,
>> you'd add your name to the list. Additionally, if there was a
>> bulk contribution that seeded a module (like the three contribs
>> we have now), we can have a note about that at the top of the
>> AUTHORS file such as "ArchieVM originally contributed by Archie
>> Cobbs" (yeah, I know we aren't calling it ArchieVM...) or
>> something like that.
>> Thoughts?
>> geir
>>
>
>
> --
> Andrew C. Oliver
> SuperLink Software, Inc.
>
> Java to Excel using POI
> http://www.superlinksoftware.com/services/poi
> Commercial support including features added/implemented, bugs fixed.
>
>
--
Geir Magnusson Jr +1-203-665-6437
geirm@apache.org
|