Contributors.txt and @author in license headers

[Vincent Massol]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Vincent Massol [mailto:vincent at massol.net]
> Sent: lundi 13 novembre 2006 16:46
> To: 'xwiki-dev at objectweb.org'
> Subject: RE: Contributors.txt and @author in license headers
> 
> 
> 
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: Vincent Massol [mailto:vincent at massol.net]
> > Sent: lundi 13 novembre 2006 16:43
> > To: 'xwiki-dev at objectweb.org'
> > Subject: Contributors.txt and @author in license headers
> >
> > Hi,
> >
> > Our license headers say: " * Copyright 2006, XpertNet SARL, and
> > individual contributors as indicated by the contributors.txt."
> >
> > There are 3 problems with this that I can see:
> >
> > 1) It's not really English in that it's either missing a "file" at
> the
> > end or we should remove the "the" before "contributors" ;-)
> > 2) I cannot find the contributors.txt file!
> > 3) I don't think we should explicitely mention the file name as we'll
> > always risk having to rename all headers if we decide to put this
> file
> > somewhere else/name it differently.
> > 4) In several of our license headers there are @authors. For example:
> >
> > /*
> >  * Copyright 2006, XpertNet SARL, and individual contributors as
> > indicated
> >  * by the contributors.txt.
> >
> > [snip]
> >
> > * You should have received a copy of the GNU Lesser General Public
> >  * License along with this software; if not, write to the Free
> >  * Software Foundation, Inc., 51 Franklin St, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA
> >  * 02110-1301 USA, or see the FSF site: http://www.fsf.org.
> >  *
> >  * @author ravenees
> >  * @author jeremi
> >  */
> >
> > I thought the authors were supposed to be indicated in the
> > contributors.txt file! :-)
> >
> > Personally I don't like @author tags and especially not in license
> > headers (actually it's the first time I ever see them put there, they
> > are usually put in the class javadoc). The reason I don't like these
> > tags is because:
> > * they are always not up to date and there are usually mane more
> > authors than the ones listed
> > * we never know what the author has worked on in the file and to what
> > extent. For example someone could have simply added a missing dot in
> a
> > javdoc.
> > * this information is better defined in the SCM which contains the
> full
> > history and what everyone has exactly contributed to.
> >
> > So I'd be in favor of implementing the contributors.txt file and
> > removing all @authors tags from the license headers.
> 
> FWIW in cargo, we store contributions in SVN and they're also available
> on the web site at http://cargo.codehaus.org/Credits. It's never
> completely up to date but it's a good first approach. This is the
> equivalent of the contributors.txt file.

Ah last point, Maven2's pom.xml has a tag to define both committers and
contributors too. So we could also use that instead of a contributors.txt
file. The advantage is that there's no place to define what the contributors
have contributed too which means it's not going to be obsolete. To see what
contributors have done, people could see fisheye, jira, svn. Actually
fisheye would be the best tool for that, especially as it integrates with
jira.

Thus WDYT about using the pom.xml file to indicate committers and
contributors?

Thanks
-Vincent






	

	
		
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