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

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 IOW, the Author: comments are quickly out of date, 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(a)redhat.com&gt; 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.