Our license comments are with /** instead of /* ?

[darius (Darius Jazayeri)]

Today I noticed that when we put our license on Java files, we use javadoc comments instead of plain comments, e.g. /** instead of /*.

This seems strange to me (although looking back at our older code, we were doing the same thing before our license update), so I checked a few other open-source Java projects, and I see they are all doing it the other way, with /*:

• Spring: https://github.com/spring-projects/spring-framework/blob/master/spring-context/src/main/java/org/springframework/context/ApplicationContext.java
• Tomcat: https://github.com/apache/tomcat/blob/trunk/java/org/apache/catalina/startup/Tomcat.java
• Mockito: https://github.com/mockito/mockito/blob/master/src/main/java/org/mockito/Mockito.java

I guess it’s too late for us to do anything about this, but it’s kind of annoying, because IntelliJ defaults to putting the copyright within /* comments, and I don’t see a setting to change that behavior.

Does anyone have any thoughts about this +/- how I can get IntelliJ to behave in a way that I won’t have to manually modify every file I ever create in OpenMRS?

[wyclif (Wyclif Luyima)]

IntelliJ let’s you specify the copyright which includes the start and end characters for the comments

[darius (Darius Jazayeri)]

In IntelliJ 15 you specify the license in a “copyright profile”, with just the license text, and then you specify the formatting per-file-type (e.g. if you’re putting the license on XML code you wouldn’t want to include the javadoc comment characters).

I did just realize that I can trick IntelliJ into doing this by setting custom formatting options for Java, and saying “Borders -> Separator before” with length 2.

However this seems like an annoying step to ask developers to do to get an OpenMRS dev environment set up.

Could we tweak our maven build settings so that we accept Java files whose licenses start with either /* or /** ?