On Thu, May 10, 2012 at 11:16 AM, Bruce Momjian <bruce@momjian.us> wrote:
>> Yes. This seems to be a policy change that was made without notice or
>> discussion, and I personally don't find it to be a good idea. I think
>> the release notes should only credit the primary author(s) of a feature.
>> Face it, most people don't care about that, so we should not be
>> expending much space on it.
>
> Agreed on just using the primary author. The first name is _always_ the
> primary author, so we can just go with that. I didn't want to do:
>
> (Tom Lane, Robert Haas; reviewers Bruce Momjian, Jeff Davis)
>
> That was too complicated.
>
> Should I make the change now? It is easy. Should we remove the names
> completely? We can consider going to a single name as a move toward
> removing names evantually.
There are some cases, like index-only scans, where I think it would be
very hard to get down to one name, because four different people wrote
code that ended up being part of that. Now you could probably get it
down to just two by cutting Heikki (who isn't listed) and Ibrar (who
is) but saying that only one of Tom and I did that feature would be
quite misleading regardless of who you picked. Similarly, there are a
couple of patches that I worked on with Simon where crediting only one
of us would be wrong, regardless of which one you picked, and I think
there are other cases of this involving other people as well. So I
think a hard and fast rule of crediting exactly one person is not
going to work, but limiting it to the primary author or authors is
feasible.
Honestly, I'm leaning more and more toward the view that we should
just rip the names out entirely. I mean, look at something like
sortsupport. That would never have gotten done without Peter
Geoghegan's work on it, but the code *as committed* was half mine and
half Tom's. So what are you going to do with that? It's weird to
credit Peter and not Tom or I, and it's weird to credit Tom or I and
not Peter, and it's even weird of you credit all three of us because
any decision about who to put first is arguable and maybe wrong. The
simplest solution to my mind is to credit no one, which at least has
the advantage of being unarguably uniform.
--
Robert Haas
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