Re: [HACKERS] Uniform policy for author credits in contrib module documentation?

On Dec 7, 2007 9:03 AM, Andrew Dunstan <andrew(at)dunslane(dot)net> wrote:
>
>
> Joshua D. Drake wrote:
> > Tom Lane wrote:
> >> Josh Berkus <josh(at)agliodbs(dot)com> writes:
> >>> Historically, the only way to troubleshoot some of the contrib
> >>> modules was to e-mail the author. If people think that we've
> >>> reached a standard that everything in /contrib is now
> >>> well-documented and supported by the general community, the I
> >>> suppose we don't need contact information. I'm not so sure myself.
> >>
> >> I do not think that we should encourage people to mail the authors first
> >> rather than pgsql-bugs. For one thing, a lot of those addresses are
> >> dead, and some of the ones that aren't don't respond especially fast.
> >>
> >> If the community-at-large can't handle a bug, we certainly have enough
> >> institutional memory to try to contact the original author, even if that
> >> address isn't in the SGML docs.
> >>
> >
> > Perhaps the at a minimum the email goes in the commit?
> >
>
> I don't see any reason, unless we're going to start doing that for all
> contributions. 'contrib' is a serious misnomer anyway, and there's no
> reason to think in general that the original author is specially
> responsible for any of it. I think Tom's point is entirely valid.

I think it is totally appropriate to replace the email address contact
information with a link to pgsql-bugs.

But there are reasons other than bugfixing to contact the original
author of a patch or contrib packages. Some of those could include:

* collaboration on a professional, hobby or academic research level
* journalism/books written about PostgreSQL
* academic or historical research into the development of PostgreSQL
* job prospects
* socializing

For those reasons, I think it would be a huge loss to the community to
remove the credit sections or to prevent their inclusion in future
documentation. Maintaining them leaves a breadcrumb trail that
otherwise would be lost in mailing list threads and commit logs that
are very difficult for a person without specialized knowledge to
navigate. Why make contacting people hard?

Some of the contrib features are likely targets for future research
and development (for example: tsearch, HOT, pl/lolcode - not contrib,
but awesome!) and in that context, the specific people involved are
important.

Contrib documentation will get folded into the main docs eventually
(and at that point, the credits are removed). But the record of that
evolution is easily accessed, without any special knowledge of a
revision control system, or mailing list culture.

And I realize that the logical extension of what I am saying is a
research and documentation project about the people who all have
contributed to the development of PostgreSQL.

-selena

--
Selena Deckelmann
PDXPUG - Portland PostgreSQL Users Group
http://pugs.postgresql.org/pdx
http://www.chesnok.com/daily