[p4] Concept of file ownership

[Patrick M. Slattery]

There was an interesting article on the dangers of code ownership on  
The Register a few weeks back, while the article focused on OSS  
projects you could easily project a lot of what they were talking  
about onto your own in-house developers...

Google defends open source from 'poisonous people'
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/05/30/google_open_source_talk/

Excerpt:
Two of Subversion's founding developers - Brian Fitzpatrick and Ben  
Collins-Sussman - believe in open source projects that maintain a  
large "bus factor." That would be the number of people who could get  
run over by a bus before the project collapses. A simple means of  
maintaining a large bus factor, they say, is banning names from source  
code.
"You have to discourage people from feeling like 'This is my module. I  
wrote this. Every change has to be approved by me,'" Collins-Sussman  
argues. "That's very dangerous for the project as a whole."
This may mean the loss of some valuable contributors - and some  
valuable code. But in the end, the project comes out ahead. There will  
always be more contributors. And more code. "You can't sacrifice the  
long-term health of a project for short-term gain."

On Aug 11, 2008, at 7:56 PM, Calman, Kevin wrote:

>   One thing I sorely miss in Perforce from other SCMs the concept of  
> file
> ownership. It seems that the person who touched the code last is the  
> only
> one to be held responsible for any issue that arises in the code,  
> whether
> that person made the faulty change or not. I am aware of the  
> Revision graph
> and Time-lapse views, but they still only give you a listing of who  
> made
> each change, not who owns the file as a whole.
>   Identifiable file ownership is important because it ties into the
> practices of peer code review, problem determination, and long-term  
> design
> issues. These cannot be addressed by the developer-du-jour who breezes
> through to implement a feature or fix a defect.
>   Was file ownership intentionally omitted from Perforce's feature  
> set,
> and if so, why?
>   Could 'owner' be added as an attribute to the File object in  
> Perforce?
> Has it been requested before?
>   Are there any good work-arounds in practice that people can suggest?
>
> Thanks for your feedback.
> -- 
> Opinions herein are exclusively my own, unless you share them.
> Kevin Calman, kevin dot calman at acs dash inc dot com
>
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