On 06/13/2017 03:33 AM, Antoine Musso wrote: Aha .. thanks! I was looking at a 2016 code review y'day and noticed my comment about @author there ( https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/279669/9/includes/tidy/Balancer.php@24 ) and remember seeing a phab task afterwards but couldn't find it easily ... so I figured I dreamt it up ;-) But, anyway, looks like that is the place to add additional comments and figure out if this can be acted upon. Subbu.

I agree @author tags should be removed and replaced with a mention (or maybe even a new section) in CREDIT file Zppix Volunteer developer for WMF enwp.org/User:Zppix On Jun 13, 2017 3:02 PM, "Stas Malyshev" <smalyshev(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:

On Jun 13, 2017 6:24 AM, "Gergo Tisza" <gtisza(a)wikimedia.org> wrote: On Tue, Jun 13, 2017 at 7:11 AM, Subramanya Sastry <ssastry(a)wikimedia.org> wrote: It can sometimes tell you whom to ask for advice or reviews. (git log would too but it's more effort.) For the record (since one of my patches was specifically mentioned) Gergo's reason matches mine. This is common (if informal) practice for a number of open source software projects---a way to easily indicate the original author of the code, as a pointer to who to ask if you've got questions about it. The informal practice is to add yourself to the list if you undertake any major change or refactoring, some contribution which would make you "at least as good a person to ask questions of" for some part of the file. It's admittedly imperfect. We have a list of module owners on-wiki which is "better" but much harder to find. And as Gergo says, `git log` is more authoritative, although anyone who has tried this sort of archeology knows that it can be exhausting to scroll through the long history of trivial fixes, language updates, code style tweaks, etc to find the few people who made significant contributions. In my experience a central CREDITS file is actually worse for code archeology (although perhaps meets certain legal obligations better). Because it is separate from the file itself, it is harder to find (and if it's hard to find, we might as well use our on-wiki list), and less likely to be kept up to date. I'm listed in the Linux kernel CREDITS file for several projects which have subsequently been completely removed from the source tree! If you keep @authors in the source file at least it stands a better shot at being removed if/when the code is, or of surviving a renaming or refactoring if still relevant. (The linux kernel has both standalone CREDITS akin to our on-wiki list of module maintainers as well as in-flight authorship info, and I still get occasional inquiries from folks diving into the pty code for the first time.) If we were to make a change, I'd suggest including an @authors tag in each file explicitly naming the appropriate on-wiki module owners list, ie: @author https://meta/wiki/Module_owners#Parser Or what have you. Simply removing the @author tag seems like it is removing a resource for new contributors with no replacement. --scott

It's the internet, nobody ever really goes away. ;) I will say, this convention makes more sense for a large project like mediawiki core with many contributors; even more so if some of those contributors are volunteers or short-term, since the @author tag can help to track them down absent any long-term association with the WMF. It is less necessary for a project like parsoid, which is authored in the main by five or fewer folks. But I'd support an effort to add @author tags which deference via the wiki module owners table. --scott On Jun 13, 2017 12:59 PM, "Subramanya Sastry" <ssastry(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:

Piling on here, but I wanted to point out that this in my opinion is what git blame <https://git-scm.com/docs/git-blame> is for. PHPStorm, Sublime Text, Vim, others I'm sure, all have plugins to quickly see who last touched each line of code. To dig deeper (maybe the last person just fixed a typo), try searching the log for just that set of lines, e.g. for lines 110 to 115 in api.php: git log -L110,115:/path/to/api.php ~Leon On Tue, Jun 13, 2017 at 4:06 PM, Stas Malyshev &lt;smalyshev(a)wikimedia.org&gt; wrote:

There are also some newer initiatives for having a list of contributors that is more prominently featured on the readme or docs, and that also includes other kinds of contributions, not just code creation (docs, design, review, funding, tutorials...). I find the idea very appealing to recognize and empower all kinds of contributions/contributors, it would be great to make a plan to move to something similar: all-contributors <https://github.com/kentcdodds/all-contributors> On Tue, Jun 13, 2017 at 12:30 PM Dan Garry &lt;dgarry(a)wikimedia.org&gt; wrote: