[libvirt] [PATCH] Remove all Author(s): lines from source file headers

[Daniel P. Berrangé]

On Thu, Dec 13, 2018 at 01:27:44PM +0100, Erik Skultety wrote:
> On Thu, Dec 13, 2018 at 11:55:50AM +0000, Daniel P. Berrangé wrote:
> > In many files there are header comments that contain an Author:
> > statement, supposedly reflecting who originally wrote the code.
> > In a large collaborative project like libvirt, any non-trivial
> > file will have been modified by a large number of different
> > contributors. IOW, the Author: comments are quickly out of date,
> > omitting people who have made significant contribitions.
> >
> > In some places Author: lines have been added despite the person
> > merely being responsible for creating the file by moving existing
> > code out of another file. IOW, the Author: lines give an incorrect
> > record of authorship.
> >
> > With this all in mind, the comments are useless as a means to identify
> > who to talk to about code in a particular file. Contributors will always
> > be better off using 'git log' and 'git blame' if they need to  find the
> > author of a particular bit of code.
> >
> > This commit thus deletes all Author: comments from the source and adds
> > a rule to prevent them reappearing.
> >
> > The Copyright headers are similarly misleading and inaccurate, however,
> > we cannot delete these as they have legal meaning, despite being largely
> > inaccurate. In addition only the copyright holder is permitted to change
> > their respective copyright statement.
> >
> > Signed-off-by: Daniel P. Berrangé <berrange at redhat.com>
> 
> This fails on apibuild.py with:
> Header libvirt-common lacks a Author description (...aand a bunch of other
> headers too)
>
> You might want to adjust the script not to require the field when serializing
> the API XML.

Doh, yes, never occurred to me we'd be pulling that into docs :-(

> 
> Reviewed-by: Erik Skultety <eskultet at redhat.com>

Regards,
Daniel
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