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When refactoring and reusing code, is it even ethical to change author?
I am on a project of creating reusable library from another project. Original code is perfectly written, easy to understand. I will just prune the code and fix minor bugs.

I have seen colleagues replacing the original author field in the same scenario with their names, feels wrong. Can I add non-standard maintainer field in doxygen format?

Comments
  • 4
    The author is who ever wrote it.
    The maintainer is who changed it.
  • 1
    So doxygen maintainer tag is a good solution?
  • 3
    @aviophile to be specific.

    I would use

    \author <@original>
    \version 1.0

    \author <@you>
    \version 1.1
  • 3
    Its more a question of why do you want your name on it? You dont want people coming to you with dumb questions
  • 2
    @Codex404 good point of view :). They will find me by commit records though. I would have gotten away if not for meddling git.
  • 0
    @aviophile if they are smart enough to not stop looking past the author tag they are smart enough to not ask dumb questions
  • 1
    We stopped using the Author fields in our projects long time ago, git will blame you, the Author field only confuses things 70% of the time, the 30% its just useless compared to git
  • 0
    If you mean the tag @author withing the code, DUDE!!!! that is disgusting, any comment within the code means the code is not self explanatory.

    Hughhh!!! who the hell keeps comments in his code anymore?
  • 0
    @Hazarth I will be seen as git author of those, I have no problem with it. I mean the @author tag inside source files for documenting.
  • 0
    @arcioneo he should have used “<name>_” tag in filename, function name and variables, I agree.
  • 0
    @aviophile ye ye, thats what I mean. There's no use in using the in-code tags, much less so to update them. All the names are already in the repo. Which is why, in our company, we stopped using the @Author tag.. and our IDEs are configured to not generate those at all.

    People that update the @Author tag are annoying! :)
  • 0
    We are moving code from svn to git. So, I dont want those good developers’ name vanish in history. A small token of respect for better people, they have really written good code.
  • 0
    @aviophile it is possible to keep history and authors when switching. Dont ask me how but one project I worked on did that.
  • 0
    I know svn to git methods. But original codebase is huge executable project while new one is static library derived of old’s portions.

    So, there is not really meaningful continuity plus I want to preserve names in .c files.
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