To: pgsql-hackers@postgreSQL.org, pgsql-docs@postgreSQL.org
Subject: Uniform policy for author credits in contrib module documentation?
Date: Wed, 05 Dec 2007 23:58:52 -0500
Message-ID: <3393.1196917132@sss.pgh.pa.us>
From: Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>

As of CVS HEAD, some of the contrib module documentation pages have
extensive credit screeds, eg
http://developer.postgresql.org/pgdocs/postgres/cube.html
and some just have the author's name, with or without an <email> link,
and some don't have anything at all.

This bothers me; it seems like we should have a more uniform approach.

There are some arguments to be made for not having credits at all.
We don't make a habit of crediting individuals anywhere else in the SGML
docs; credits in the source code and/or CVS logs are supposed to be
enough.  And we do still have author credits in contrib/README, not to
mention the individual source code files.  And there's the whole issue
that files that have been there awhile have probably been tweaked by
a number of people besides the original author.  OTOH I dislike removing
credits that the authors might have expected to be there, and the
contrib modules mostly do have identifiable original authors.

If we do want to keep credits in the SGML pages, how extensive should
they be?  I already took it on myself to remove Gene Selkov's snailmail
address, but do we even want email addresses there?  A lot of them are
probably dead, and the ones that aren't are causing their owners to get
extra spam, because an <email> link is about the easiest thing to scrape
from a webpage that there could possibly be.

I don't have a strong opinion one way or the other, except that I think
we should have a uniform policy for all the contrib modules.

Comments?

			regards, tom lane