On Wed, Oct 08, 2014 at 09:30:42AM +0200, Christian Berendt wrote: > After proposing a change to Horizon to remove the @author tags from the > header of Python files (https://review.openstack.org/#/c/126656/) > Matthias Runge proposed to discuss this first on the mailing list. > > Is it necessary to track the authorship of a file inside the file using > @author tags?
The only time @author tags are remotely accurate is immediately after a new file is merged. 6 months down the line when countless different people have submitted & merged patches against the fie, the @author tags are just plain wrong and/or misleading. GIT does a far better job of tracking authorship per line (eg git blame). @author tags have outlived their usefulness by many years. > The copyright statement itself is unchanged and intact after the removal > of the @author tags. > > The copyright statement is not addicted to the authorship of a file so > it should be safe to remove the @author tags. The "Copyright" lines directly reference the entity asserting copyright ownership. They aren't conected to / dependant on the @author tags, not least because the person who authored the code won't be the entity who actually holds copyright in the case of most corporate contributions. > The @author tag is not used in other projects. Neutron removed all > @author tags some time ago and there are no @author tags e.g. in Nova, > or Cinder. There are even local hacking checks in Nova, and Neutron to > not use @author tags. Yep, we removed the few cases where people added @author in Nova and added the hacking rule to prevent their reintroduction. I see no reason not todo the same across all openstack projects. Regards, Daniel -- |: http://berrange.com -o- http://www.flickr.com/photos/dberrange/ :| |: http://libvirt.org -o- http://virt-manager.org :| |: http://autobuild.org -o- http://search.cpan.org/~danberr/ :| |: http://entangle-photo.org -o- http://live.gnome.org/gtk-vnc :| _______________________________________________ OpenStack-dev mailing list OpenStack-dev@lists.openstack.org http://lists.openstack.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/openstack-dev
