RE: [FR-devel] Standard source code header.

[Curt Hibbs]

Laurent Julliard wrote:
> I'm a bit reluctant to include any kind of link to a location that is
> subject to change. if one day we migrate our CVS tree elsewhere or even
> Savannah changes the way it references change logs of a given file then
> we must go through all the headers and modify them. Tedious...
>
> I had the same doubt with referencing people's email in the header
> because email addresses tend to change as well so may be email could be
> optional.

I think that you raise some reasonable issue. I have a couple thoughts and
questions.

While it is possible for anything to change (web addresses, email
addresses), in our inter-networked world it also seems reasonable to include
links to relevant information. But we want to make sure that things we link
to are reasonably stable.

So my question is, what do we consider to be stable enough that we can link
to it? Can we link to our Savannah project pages? What about our rubyide.org
wiki pages? (BTW, Rich and I tried to purchase freeride.org from its owner,
but he wouldn't sell.)

I like the idea of using the CVS log for the history. If we decide its a bad
idea to include an actual link we could include a textual reference ("See
the CVS log for file history."), leaving it up to the reader to know where
the FreeRIDE CVS repository is located.

Or would including a link be OK, because if the location did change, we
could easily do a global change on the source code to fix it. On the other
hand, if we started to have many different types of references like this, I
could see how it could get unmanageable.

I've got mixed feelings on this and could go either way, although I really
like the idea of taking advantage of modern hyper linking.

Comments?

Curt