Developers of Sympa

[David Verdin <address@concealed>]

Hi Guillaume,

Le 04/12/12 13:10, Guillaume Rousse a écrit :

address@concealed">Hello.

As you may have noticed, I spent some efforts in making the whole set of perl modules the more visually consistent as possible, using uniform formatting templates. This include for instance removing tautological comments as 'this is the constructor', or 'all perl modules should return 1', which usually just bring noise without relevant information, or making all files use the same svn keyword substitution mechanism.

and your efforts have not been unnoticed. We really appreciate clarity as we deal with this code on a daily basis.

address@concealed">They are two additional pieces of information I'd like to clear, but as they are a bit more sensible, I'd like some mutual decision first.

Despite usual advices from the FSF zealots, I'm very sceptic of the interest of duplicating a whole block of legal information in every file of a single application. Especially if this leads to outdated information, as the FSF adress isn't valid anymore, and the copyright years don't go past 2001. Duplication, as usual, leads to maintainance nightmare.

The same is true for the authors list: do we really need a file-specific author list, and if so, how do we handle refactoring, where content is moved between files ?

So, I suggest to clear those lines, and instead use a single block at the end of each file, such as:

=head1 AUTHORS, LICENSE AND COPYRIGHT

This file is part of Sympa project, see project documentation for details about authors, license and copyright.

This is not just a cosmetic issue. I think than being able to read a module description directly when opening it in a text editor, without having first to skip a whole lot of useless stuff such as a warranty denial, helps understanding its purpose at first glance.

Sure.
However...

On the topic of license, it's sure that any bit of sympa code is GPL v2 so a simple one line notice will do.
On the topic of authors, it's a little more complicated as :

• some modules have initially been written by the Sympa authors
• some modules have been written by contributors
• all modules known to men have been, at least on one occasion, been modified by somebody.

As a conclusion, I have no idea how to gice proper credit to the numerous people that have contributed to sympa. I thought that leaving the name of the original module authors in the file could be such a mean.

Cheers,

David

Attachment: smime.p7s
Description: Signature cryptographique S/MIME