Open Stack

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
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