Begin forwarded message:
From: pharo-project-owner@lists.gforge.inria.fr Date: October 12, 2008 9:29:18 PM CEDT To: stephane.ducasse@free.fr Subject: food for thoughts :)
You are not allowed to post to this mailing list, and your message has been automatically rejected. If you think that your messages are being rejected in error, contact the mailing list owner at pharo-project-owner@lists.gforge.inria.fr.
From: stephane ducasse <stephane.ducasse@free.fr> Date: October 12, 2008 9:29:16 PM CEDT To: Pharo Development <Pharo-project@lists.gforge.inria.fr> Subject: food for thoughts :)
p 129
At the Apache Software foundation we discourage the use of author tags in source code. There are various reasons for this, apart from the legal ramifications. Collabor- ative development is about working on projects as a group and caring for the project as a group. Giving credit is good, and should be done, but in a way that does not al- low for false attribution, even by implication. There is no clear line for when to add or remove an author tag. Do you add your name when you change a comment? When you put in a one-line fix? Do you remove other author tags when you refactor the code and it looks 95% different? What do you do about people who go about touching every file, changing just enough to make the virtual author tag quota, so that their name will be everywhere?
There are better ways to give credit, and our preference is to use those. From a tech- nical standpoint author tags are unnecessary; if you wish to find out who wrote a par- ticular piece of code, the version control system can be consulted to figure that out. Author tags also tend to get out of date. Do you really wish to be contacted in private about a piece of code you wrote five years ago and were glad to have forgotten?