Finalize the created_by field requirement/design

[oindrillac]

Currently the taxonomy processing can accept only one author. Make changes to the flow to accept more than one author for a file

[lehors]

I think this should rather be filed against the CLI.

[ckadner]

How about adding a new field co_authors:

#119 (comment)

created_by: mairin
co_authors:
  - bh1000

I should not break existing CLI code, just get ignored, but it does allow to record all editors

[russellb]

What's the value of the author field over what can be extracted from git history?

[anik120]

I think this is more of a feature enhancement of the backend tools that's processing those qna.yml files. Afaik nothing in this cli does anything with those files. Let me reach out to some folks and get some clarifications

[russellb]

I think this is more of a feature enhancement of the backend tools that's processing those qna.yml files. Afaik nothing in this cli does anything with those files. Let me reach out to some folks and get some clarifications

Sounds great. I think even if the backend desires to do something with author information, we can automate the extraction of that data and the result will be much more accurate as time goes on.

[anik120]

We discussed this in the call and here's the conclusion:

The created_by field is not actually being used by any component in the cli or the backend. It was introduced initially as a way to credit the authors, but that was before git was introduced in the picture. Now that this is all tracked in git, we can just get rid of the created_by field, since git tracks that for us anyway. So we'll be getting rid of the created_by filed all together. Opening up a PR in the taxonomy repo to remove that field from existing files.

[anik120]

This had to be reverted since we were unaware that the schema structure for qna.yaml was being used as a first class schema. Which meant a change to the structure actually broke the components that assumed the first class schema. Opening this back up to finalize a soft decision and implement it: allow a list of authors instead of just one.

[bjhargrave]

After discussion in several standups today, I think there is general consensus that real author attribution information, for multiple authors, is in git (author in commit and Co-authored-by in commit messages aggregated over all commits which modify a file).

Therefore, we should use this issue to close on the subject of whether we can remove created_by from the yaml (schemas and any documentation and ultimately from existing yaml files).

• Is there any requirement from a legal perspective on the created_by element? The git author information is actually more complete and trustworthy. @katesoule
• Does the back end require the presence of the created_by element for any reason? If so, can this be addressed? @shivchander

[github-actions]

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