I do not have a strong opinion either way, but I find the argument not convincing. I strongly believe that a part of the source/component has probably been written and is maintained by a very limited number of people. Occasionally somebody might "adopt" this but at that point this person quite clearly has the agency and responsibility to do add a new @authors line.
Somebody adding an occasional patch is of course also the author of that particular change, but the authors info is more than credit to the copyright/code, it is also an indication who is most likely knowledgeable about that part, e.g. if somebody wants to use it or improve/fix it or just understand it. Hence, from the point of view of credit/copyright I do not really care. But as a general indicator who wrote that part (esp. in GNUnet: that component) I find it useful. BR > On 7. Oct 2019, at 19:51, Christian Grothoff <groth...@gnunet.org> wrote: > > Signed PGP part > Hi all, > > Sorry for cross-posting, but 'someone' just triggered me and this > applies to multiple packages, at least in theory: > > On 10/7/19 7:33 PM, someone wrote (privately): >> Trying to define authors of individual source files (as opposed to >> individual commits) seems hopelessly subjective as they get extensively >> edited over time. > > This was about the community removing author attributions in individual > source files from glibc. I have been thinking about this as well > recently, and 'someone's message succinctly describes the issue: we have > @author comments, but they don't really reflect contributors. Often we > forget to add, copy or even remove @author tags, and this is not easily > fixed either. > > Naturally, this is not about removing (all) credit: we would still have > both the top-level AUTHORS file and the attribution via the Git history. > > So, please do let me know if you (for whatever reason) would object to > removing the per-source file @author attributions. If nobody has a > (reasonable / sustained) objection, I'll probably remove the @author > lines in a few weeks. > > Thanks! > > Christian > > >
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