[dna-dev] Re: @author tags in our codebase
Sergey Litsenko
litsenko_sergey at yahoo.com
Wed Jan 14 17:37:55 EST 2009
-1
It is optional - would be better to allow keeping authors tags while automating process of getting full list.
On one hand, I'm not sold on the idea that if the author tag will be removed it might help to brought more commiters. If I see some issue in the source code and I know how to fix it - I'll provide a patch/fix whetever I'm in the "magic list" or not.
The only question that might be asked: are OSS team members interested in accepting such contributor's efforts or not?
It's about mentality and maturity of committers as well as part of OSS
project's culture established by team members - e.g. responding to
user questions, issues, etc - in e-mails, users forums, etc and welcoming user's opinions on how things should work (functional requirements). Also you can use something like following: "@author DNA Expert Group"
for classes/packages designed / developed by group of authors.
Generally, I believe that everything that is part of Java Language specification (e.g.) and/or part of general practices is valid and justified to be part of any source code.
On the other hand, since it's possible to automate process of getting list of autors from both - SCM repository and source code/POM - maintenance would not be that hard, and IMO efforts should go that way rather than removing tags. I bet that I can find some maven plugin or develop my own to automate that process. For example, http://www.statsvn.org and http://stat-scm.sourceforge.net are good starting points.
I will vote "+2" on the ability to automate process of getting full list of contributors (maven report plugin) and makit it part of distribution and Maven project site.
Sergiy
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Today's Topics:
1. Re: @author tags in our codebase (Randall Hauch)
2. Re: @author tags in our codebase (Vatsal)
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Message: 1
Date: Tue, 13 Jan 2009 16:03:23 -0600
From: Randall Hauch <rhauch at redhat.com>
Subject: Re: [dna-dev] @author tags in our codebase
To: JBoss DNA <dna-dev at lists.jboss.org>
Message-ID: <160467FE-4D64-4943-BBAC-3D9535FD670C at redhat.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
We never really came to a consensus on this question, and I'd like to
try to do that. To be clear, here is the proposal:
1) Remove the @author lines from the code, and instead rely upon SVN
as the official master record of individual contributions
2) Change the Eclipse preference files to remove the @author lines
from the code templates
3) Add a AUTHORS file to the distribution(s); this file will contain
the names and email addresses for all contributors, and can even allow
a contributor to describe their contribution if they so desire.
4) Change the headers to remove the "@author" wording and to replace
it with "See the AUTHORS file in the
distribution for a full listing of individual contributors."
5) Change the POM files to include the AUTHORS file in each
distribution.
The AUTHORS file would look like this:
Randall Hauch (rhauch at redhat.com)
John Verhaeg (jverhaeg at redhat.com)
Dan Florian (dflorian at redhat.com)
Stefano Maestri (stefano.maestri at javalinux.it)
Serge Pagop (Serge.Pagop at innoq.com)
Michael Trezzi (michael at mathwizard.org)
Alexandre Porcelli (porcelli at devexp.com.br)
Sergiy Litsenko (litsenko_sergey at yahoo.com)
Note that unlike the @author tags, this file will list all
contributors, and the names of new contributors will be appended to
the list by the project lead. (No names will be removed from this
file.)
I would prefer to hear from every contributor, so please respond with
+1 if you agree with this proposal, 0 if you don't care, or -1 if you
want to keep the @author tags. If you vehemently want to keep the
@author tags and names in the source file, please say so.
Best regards,
Randall
On Nov 18, 2008, at 3:33 PM, Randall Hauch wrote:
>
> On Nov 18, 2008, at 2:52 PM, Stefano Maestri wrote:
>
>>
>> Randall Hauch wrote on 17/11/08 22:17:
>>> I've recently read a suggestions for open source communities that
>>> the
>>> author names are removed from the content. In the case of DNA's
>>> codebase, that would mean removing the @author tags.
>> May I ask where?
>
> I knew someone was going to ask. :-) I had to go back and look, but
> here are a few:
> http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-4216011961522818645&ei=8o0YSbiFOY6qrgLC2PnLDQ&q=poisonous+people
> http://docs.ofbiz.org/display/OFBADMIN/Coding+Conventions
> http://subversion.tigris.org/hacking.html#other-conventions
> http://blogs.sun.com/ahe/entry/author_tags
>
>>
>>>
>>> tags:
>>>
>>> 1. When there are no @author tags, then there is a far smaller
>>> notion of ownership by the author(s). On one side of this, the
>>> author(s) may not appreciate changes to "their" code, and on the
>>> other side, non-authors may feel intimidated about working on
>>> code for which they are not an author. IMO, we want to
>>> _discourage_ ownership and _encourage_ everyone to work in any
>>> area of the code they want.
>>>
>> +1...but is really @author tag intimating someone, or giving
>> ownership
>> to some other? Quiet frankly not for me.
>
> I hope it doesn't discourage people from contributing and diving in
> wherever they want. BTW, it's quite possible that no matter what
> our policy, some people may not like it. For example, if we were to
> adopt a policy of NOT including @author tags, some people may refuse
> to join the community because they see the @author tag as proof they
> worked on it. It takes all kinds of people. :-)
>
>>
>> Anyway I agree on the _discurage_ownership and _encourage_everyone to
>> work in any area, so if it can help, remove @author tag.
>>
>>> 1. @author tags can be inaccurate. SVN has the true history of who
>>> contributed exactly what code.
>>>
>> +1
>
> IMO, this is perhaps the biggest justifiable reason. Its rubbish if
> its not up-to-date, so it seems far better to not have @author tags.
>
>>
>>>
>>> The only benefit I can think of is that the @author tag does help to
>>> give some notion of who is the "expert" of the class, in case they
>>> need to be consulted. However, I don't believe this is really
>>> much of
>>> a reason, since it's far better to consult the SVN history and see
>>> who
>>> actually modified the different parts of the code. In fact, the
>>> annotated views in Fisheye even show on many of the lines the name
>>> of
>>> the last person to change it. For example,
>>> see http://fisheye.jboss.org/browse/DNA/trunk/dna-common/src/main/java/org/jboss/dna/common/i18n/I18n.java?r=120
>>>
>> abosolutely better to use fisheye...if fine people of JBoss.org would
>> also mind to upgrade it to a more recent version it would be even
>> better. Also Jira integration may help a lot.
>>
>> I would just add that if we decide to remove the tag we have to
>> change
>> also the license information at the beginnig of any file which say:
>> /* 2
>> <http://fisheye.jboss.org/browse/DNA/trunk/dna-graph/src/main/java/org/jboss/dna/graph/GraphI18n.java?r=598#l2
>> >
>> * JBoss, Home of Professional Open Source. 3
>> <http://fisheye.jboss.org/browse/DNA/trunk/dna-graph/src/main/java/org/jboss/dna/graph/GraphI18n.java?r=598#l3
>> >
>> * Copyright 2008, Red Hat Middleware LLC, and individual
>> contributors 4
>> <http://fisheye.jboss.org/browse/DNA/trunk/dna-graph/src/main/java/org/jboss/dna/graph/GraphI18n.java?r=598#l4
>> >
>> * as indicated by the @author tags. See the copyright.txt file in
>> the 5
>> <http://fisheye.jboss.org/browse/DNA/trunk/dna-graph/src/main/java/org/jboss/dna/graph/GraphI18n.java?r=598#l5
>> >
>> * distribution for a full listing of individual contributors.
>>
>
> Yes, we'd have to update the headers.
>
> Best regards,
>
> Randall
>
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Message: 2
Date: Wed, 14 Jan 2009 13:13:23 +0530
From: Vatsal <vatsal.avasthi at gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [dna-dev] @author tags in our codebase
To: dna-dev at lists.jboss.org
Message-ID:
<c82836c60901132343w54b690a9ha9c183e5ee61d019 at mail.gmail.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"
Sometimes it is fun to see your name in author tag of a project at a later
date when the project has matured but my vote would be for Randall's
suggestions due to practical & maintenance reasons discussed earlier, so a
+1 from me for this proposal(though I am not a contributor yet :) )...
- Vatsal
On Wed, Jan 14, 2009 at 3:33 AM, Randall Hauch <rhauch at redhat.com> wrote:
> We never really came to a consensus on this question, and I'd like to try
> to do that. To be clear, here is the proposal:
>
> 1) Remove the @author lines from the code, and instead rely upon SVN as the
> official master record of individual contributions
> 2) Change the Eclipse preference files to remove the @author lines from the
> code templates
> 3) Add a AUTHORS file to the distribution(s); this file will contain the
> names and email addresses for all contributors, and can even allow a
> contributor to describe their contribution if they so desire.
> 4) Change the headers to remove the "@author" wording and to replace it
> with "See the AUTHORS file in the
> distribution for a full listing of individual contributors."
> 5) Change the POM files to include the AUTHORS file in each distribution.
>
> The AUTHORS file would look like this:
>
> Randall Hauch (rhauch at redhat.com)
>
> John Verhaeg (jverhaeg at redhat.com)
> Dan Florian (dflorian at redhat.com)
> Stefano Maestri (stefano.maestri at javalinux.it)
> Serge Pagop (Serge.Pagop at innoq.com)
> Michael Trezzi (michael at mathwizard.org)
> Alexandre Porcelli (porcelli at devexp.com.br)
> Sergiy Litsenko (litsenko_sergey at yahoo.com)
>
>
> Note that unlike the @author tags, this file will list all contributors,
> and the names of new contributors will be appended to the list by the
> project lead. (No names will be removed from this file.)
>
> I would prefer to hear from every contributor, so please respond with +1 if
> you agree with this proposal, 0 if you don't care, or -1 if you want to keep
> the @author tags. If you vehemently want to keep the @author tags and names
> in the source file, please say so.
>
> Best regards,
>
> Randall
>
> On Nov 18, 2008, at 3:33 PM, Randall Hauch wrote:
>
>
> On Nov 18, 2008, at 2:52 PM, Stefano Maestri wrote:
>
>
> Randall Hauch wrote on 17/11/08 22:17:
>
> I've recently read a suggestions for open source communities that the
>
> author names are removed from the content. In the case of DNA's
>
> codebase, that would mean removing the @author tags.
>
> May I ask where?
>
>
> I knew someone was going to ask. :-) I had to go back and look, but here
> are a few:
>
> http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-4216011961522818645&ei=8o0YSbiFOY6qrgLC2PnLDQ&q=poisonous+people
> http://docs.ofbiz.org/display/OFBADMIN/Coding+Conventions
> http://subversion.tigris.org/hacking.html#other-conventions
> http://blogs.sun.com/ahe/entry/author_tags
>
>
>
> tags:
>
>
> 1. When there are no @author tags, then there is a far smaller
>
> notion of ownership by the author(s). On one side of this, the
>
> author(s) may not appreciate changes to "their" code, and on the
>
> other side, non-authors may feel intimidated about working on
>
> code for which they are not an author. IMO, we want to
>
> _discourage_ ownership and _encourage_ everyone to work in any
>
> area of the code they want.
>
>
> +1...but is really @author tag intimating someone, or giving ownership
>
> to some other? Quiet frankly not for me.
>
>
> I hope it doesn't discourage people from contributing and diving in
> wherever they want. BTW, it's quite possible that no matter what our
> policy, some people may not like it. For example, if we were to adopt a
> policy of NOT including @author tags, some people may refuse to join the
> community because they see the @author tag as proof they worked on it. It
> takes all kinds of people. :-)
>
>
> Anyway I agree on the _discurage_ownership and _encourage_everyone to
>
> work in any area, so if it can help, remove @author tag.
>
>
> 1. @author tags can be inaccurate. SVN has the true history of who
>
> contributed exactly what code.
>
>
> +1
>
>
> IMO, this is perhaps the biggest justifiable reason. Its rubbish if its
> not up-to-date, so it seems far better to not have @author tags.
>
>
>
> The only benefit I can think of is that the @author tag does help to
>
> give some notion of who is the "expert" of the class, in case they
>
> need to be consulted. However, I don't believe this is really much of
>
> a reason, since it's far better to consult the SVN history and see who
>
> actually modified the different parts of the code. In fact, the
>
> annotated views in Fisheye even show on many of the lines the name of
>
> the last person to change it. For example,
>
> see
> http://fisheye.jboss.org/browse/DNA/trunk/dna-common/src/main/java/org/jboss/dna/common/i18n/I18n.java?r=120
>
>
> abosolutely better to use fisheye...if fine people of JBoss.org would
>
> also mind to upgrade it to a more recent version it would be even
>
> better. Also Jira integration may help a lot.
>
>
> I would just add that if we decide to remove the tag we have to change
>
> also the license information at the beginnig of any file which say:
>
> /* 2
>
> <
> http://fisheye.jboss.org/browse/DNA/trunk/dna-graph/src/main/java/org/jboss/dna/graph/GraphI18n.java?r=598#l2
> >
>
> * JBoss, Home of Professional Open Source. 3
>
> <
> http://fisheye.jboss.org/browse/DNA/trunk/dna-graph/src/main/java/org/jboss/dna/graph/GraphI18n.java?r=598#l3
> >
>
> * Copyright 2008, Red Hat Middleware LLC, and individual contributors 4
>
> <
> http://fisheye.jboss.org/browse/DNA/trunk/dna-graph/src/main/java/org/jboss/dna/graph/GraphI18n.java?r=598#l4
> >
>
> * as indicated by the @author tags. See the copyright.txt file in the 5
>
> <
> http://fisheye.jboss.org/browse/DNA/trunk/dna-graph/src/main/java/org/jboss/dna/graph/GraphI18n.java?r=598#l5
> >
>
> * distribution for a full listing of individual contributors.
>
>
>
> Yes, we'd have to update the headers.
>
> Best regards,
>
> Randall
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> dna-dev mailing list
> dna-dev at lists.jboss.org
> https://lists.jboss.org/mailman/listinfo/dna-dev
>
>
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