configlet lint passes when the exercise is missing author

[glennj]

I submitted an exercise when I had forgotten to fill the author array in the exercise config.json (exercism/dart#550). Yet configlet lint declares - Every practice exercise has a valid .meta/config.json file

[habere-et-dispertire]

Just had the same issue.

[ee7]

@ErikSchierboom what should configlet lint do when the authors key of a practice exercise config file:

• is missing entirely?
• is present, but the value is an empty array? This is the case you objected to in Glenn's PR linked above.

The spec currently says:

• The "authors" key is optional
• The "authors" value must be an array
• The "authors" values must be non-blank strings¹
• The "authors" values must not have duplicates
• The "authors" values are treated case-insensitively

and that doesn't seem to cover the value being an empty array.

[ErikSchierboom]

I would think the consistent thing to do would be to remove the authors key. We can't make it a required field as we don't know the authors of every single exercise.

[habere-et-dispertire]

I'm not sure how contributions came to be unattributed -- perhaps they predate git blame — but another option is to have a default account like anonymous-hero (instead of anonymous-coward) for lost attributions. Some history of those terms.

[ErikSchierboom]

That's definitely an option. It would require some work though and I'm not sure Jeremy has the time for that.

[ee7]

I would think the consistent thing to do would be to remove the authors key.

Do you mean that configlet lint should produce an error for "authors": [], and that configlet fmt should remove that key/value pair?

[ErikSchierboom]

I meant just removing it, not erroring