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Re: [tracecompass-dev] Removing contributor list from copyright header

My last comment to this ...

My point is that I don't want patches to get -1 if someone added his name and contribution description to the contributor list.

/Bernd

On 08/18/2015 03:59 PM, Alexandre Montplaisir wrote:
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.
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