Nicola Ken Barozzi wrote:
>
> :-? :-/
>
> Just to make it clear before I get mistaken (not talking to Peter, but
> as a general note), I'm not talking about code ownership.
>
> In Cocoon and Forrest (the projects I'm more heavily involved as for
> concrete commits), author tags are not a problem.
> I find it cool when I can see that a certain class was made by a certain
> committer on some date, and changed by others, it gives you a sense of
> what happened, and who you might ask to get futher advice on it eventually.
>
> I tend to ask all developers to add their name to the authors with any
> commit they make that has impacted on the code (ie not cosmetics), and
> this levels the credit system. You never know from the authors if a
> certain one has made 1000 lines of code or only one.
>
> I find code ownership a problem that can and must be prevented and
> resolved in the community. A trick that seasoned committers do on new
> committers is to change their first commits and work on them, to show
> that the code is of everyone. If they complain, it's time for a nice and
> bold explanation.
> From my experience on this, it's not something one forgets easily ;-)
>
> One thing that *could* be a problem is that @author tags can give the
> impression that a cretain piece of code is "maintained" by the authors,
> or that they are responsible for it, and this can reduce peer review.
>
> But honestly if it happens I doubt it's just because of the author tags,
> and a missing tag cannot replace behaviour.
>
> Also, having author tags shows where the "stakes" of the
> committers=stakeholders of the code are.
>
> Continuing a discussion had recently on the commons list, this has
> impact on the vetos IIUC.
>
Most of the information you mentioned above is stored in CVS and in more
detail. Cluttering up a file with a bunch of useless 'i did this, i did
that' is pointless and redundant when CVS has it all saved anyway.
Just because someone authored the first version of a document or code
doesn't mean they had any bearing on the current state of it. It's lame
to take credit for something that's been contributed to a community and
being maintained by it. IMO that individual is no longer the
author/owner of it, the community is.
Now giving credit where credit is do is nice and that's why everything
contributed to httpd gets a blurb in CVS which is more than sufficent.
Shane
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