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Re: [tracecompass-dev] Removing contributor list from copyright header
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On 2015-08-18 01:57 PM, Patrick Tasse wrote:
The contributor lists have been deemed to not be useful in any way.
Not useful for legal purposes, maybe.
But that's the whole point of having these file headers at all! If we
did not need them for licensing/copyright purposes, we would not have
any headers at all.
A technically useful reason to have a list of authors is for someone
looking at the code and asking themselves "who should I email if I have
a question about this part of the code?". But the @author tags seem like
a much better place to put this information.
The contributor's name are already in @author tags
About a quarter of our files don't have any @author tag, and most that do
only have the initial author.
Then maybe these should be updated instead. Making large changes to a
file could warrant adding a @author tag too. Unlike the file header,
those also show up in the generated Javadoc.
and in Git.
Not always. Older files, files that have been split, don't have every
contributor in their git history.
As long as we keep the copyright header and @authors up to date when we
split files it should be fine. Nobody is going to look through Git to
find contributor names anyway, except as a novelty exercise.
Basically, what I'm saying is: take the contributor lists and move them
to @author tags. It's a better place to put this, it shows up in more
places, and it does not make the list of copyright holders (required for
licensing reasons) less clear.
