Dear all,

As discussed in the 1.28 release retrospective, we would like to slightly change the way authors are being listed in the Rucio project.

To give a little bit of background: Since the beginning of the project we always noted authors in two different places in the project:

1. A general AUTHORS.rst file at the root of the codebase noting all authors, and contribution years, who ever contributed to Rucio. Also a list of institutions employing contributors is available in this file.

2. In each python module at the top, under the copyright and license information we also noted authors, and contributions years, who contributed to this specific file.

These author lists serve multiple purposes. Primarily, as a community project, we want to give recognition and visibility to the individuals, and institutions, who contribute to Rucio. A lot of time, effort, and resources are contributed both, by individuals, as well as their employing institutions, to the project. This should and needs to be recognized.

Secondarily we noted authors also in each separate file to additionally have a list of contact persons in case of questions. However, this need is basically satisfied by git blame / git log.


In recent months, with increased contributors, people are repeatedly running into merge conflicts/testing conflicts due to the actual author lists (and their frequent changes) on top of the python modules. This is not only annoying, but it is also a waste of time/CI resources for something which does not necessarily need to be there and is redundant in terms of information (General author list + git log/git blame).

We therefore concluded in the 1.28 retrospective that we want to remove the authors list from the individual python modules (2) and only rely on a general authors file (1).


Now, since recognition of contributions is a very important topic in a community project I would like to raise this change beforehand and give people/institutions the chance to give feedback/raise their concerns about it. The last thing I want is that a contributor feels that their contribution is not properly recognized/visible to the community.

We will have a discussion about this topic in the Rucio meeting on April 7th. https://indico.cern.ch/event/1144146/

Please feel free to also answer to this eMail thread, or contact me directly in case you do not want to raise your concerns publicly.

Best,
Martin