On Tue, 19 Apr 2011, Guenter wrote:

> I did already in the past think about the 'Comments to: ...' lines in all
> the makefiles, and in some of mine I wrote as joke 'Comments to /dev/null'
> ... but what I want to ask about is if it really makes sense anymore to have
> those lines in the makefiles?

In general: no, it doesn't make sense.

I think there are many angles to this, and I'll try to address some of them as
I think about them:

o If people truly writes such comments in code they contribute to the
   project and they stand by them, then it feels like it is their choice and we
   should really consider respecting their wishes. We can possibly ask them to
   reconsider and state some reasons like some I'll include in this mail below.

o We get this problem with files using outdated email addresses. Or names of
   people that haven't been around in the project for years (decades!).

o Many people don't like getting addressed privately about curl related stuff
   but rather have the issues get brought to the "community" instead so those
   who are currently around and have time and effort to spend can attend to
   whatever issue there is.

o It does make the credits and attribution a bit skewed and wrongly encourages
   more poeple to add their names too and then we get into a weird arms race
   and in the end perhaps none of the persons are really involved anymore or
   care about the changes. I'm all for credit where credit is due, and I spend
   a significant amount of energy into making sure that all contributors are
   properly thanked and credited for whatever they bring to the project, but we
   shall not do that by including their names and addresses in files all over.
   It doesn't scale.

   I've removed references to specific names from source codes over the
   years for this specific reason: the information turns stale and wrong. And
   no reader really wants to read such data in source code anyway.

-- 
  / daniel.haxx.se
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