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tailscale/cmd/tsconnect
Will Norris 3ec5be3f51 all: remove AUTHORS file and references to it
This file was never truly necessary and has never actually been used in
the history of Tailscale's open source releases.

A Brief History of AUTHORS files
---

The AUTHORS file was a pattern developed at Google, originally for
Chromium, then adopted by Go and a bunch of other projects. The problem
was that Chromium originally had a copyright line only recognizing
Google as the copyright holder. Because Google (and most open source
projects) do not require copyright assignemnt for contributions, each
contributor maintains their copyright. Some large corporate contributors
then tried to add their own name to the copyright line in the LICENSE
file or in file headers. This quickly becomes unwieldy, and puts a
tremendous burden on anyone building on top of Chromium, since the
license requires that they keep all copyright lines intact.

The compromise was to create an AUTHORS file that would list all of the
copyright holders. The LICENSE file and source file headers would then
include that list by reference, listing the copyright holder as "The
Chromium Authors".

This also become cumbersome to simply keep the file up to date with a
high rate of new contributors. Plus it's not always obvious who the
copyright holder is. Sometimes it is the individual making the
contribution, but many times it may be their employer. There is no way
for the proejct maintainer to know.

Eventually, Google changed their policy to no longer recommend trying to
keep the AUTHORS file up to date proactively, and instead to only add to
it when requested: https://opensource.google/docs/releasing/authors.
They are also clear that:

> Adding contributors to the AUTHORS file is entirely within the
> project's discretion and has no implications for copyright ownership.

It was primarily added to appease a small number of large contributors
that insisted that they be recognized as copyright holders (which was
entirely their right to do). But it's not truly necessary, and not even
the most accurate way of identifying contributors and/or copyright
holders.

In practice, we've never added anyone to our AUTHORS file. It only lists
Tailscale, so it's not really serving any purpose. It also causes
confusion because Tailscalars put the "Tailscale Inc & AUTHORS" header
in other open source repos which don't actually have an AUTHORS file, so
it's ambiguous what that means.

Instead, we just acknowledge that the contributors to Tailscale (whoever
they are) are copyright holders for their individual contributions. We
also have the benefit of using the DCO (developercertificate.org) which
provides some additional certification of their right to make the
contribution.

The source file changes were purely mechanical with:

    git ls-files | xargs sed -i -e 's/\(Tailscale Inc &\) AUTHORS/\1 contributors/g'

Updates #cleanup

Change-Id: Ia101a4a3005adb9118051b3416f5a64a4a45987d
Signed-off-by: Will Norris <will@tailscale.com>
2 days ago
..
dist cmd/tsconnect: initial scaffolding for Tailscale Connect browser client 4 years ago
src all: remove AUTHORS file and references to it 2 days ago
wasm all: remove AUTHORS file and references to it 2 days ago
.gitignore cmd/tsconnect: extract NPM package for reusing in other projects 3 years ago
README.md cmd/tsconnect: use empty string as the default state store key 3 years ago
README.pkg.md cmd/tsconnect: add README to generated NPM package 3 years ago
build-pkg.go all: remove AUTHORS file and references to it 2 days ago
build.go all: remove AUTHORS file and references to it 2 days ago
common.go all: remove AUTHORS file and references to it 2 days ago
dev-pkg.go all: remove AUTHORS file and references to it 2 days ago
dev.go all: remove AUTHORS file and references to it 2 days ago
index.html cmd/tsconnect: switch UI to Preact 4 years ago
package.json cmd/tsconnect: update to xterm.js 5.1 3 years ago
package.json.tmpl all: remove AUTHORS file and references to it 2 days ago
serve.go all: remove AUTHORS file and references to it 2 days ago
tailwind.config.js cmd/tsconnect: switch UI to Preact 4 years ago
tsconfig.json cmd/tsconnect: switch UI to Preact 4 years ago
tsconnect.go all: remove AUTHORS file and references to it 2 days ago
yarn.lock build(deps): bump braces from 3.0.2 to 3.0.3 in /cmd/tsconnect (#12468) 1 year ago

README.md

tsconnect

The tsconnect command builds and serves the static site that is generated for the Tailscale Connect JS/WASM client.

Development

To start the development server:

./tool/go run ./cmd/tsconnect dev

The site is served at http://localhost:9090/. JavaScript, CSS and Go wasm package changes can be picked up with a browser reload. Server-side Go changes require the server to be stopped and restarted. In development mode the state the Tailscale client state is stored in sessionStorage and will thus survive page reloads (but not the tab being closed).

Deployment

To build the static assets necessary for serving, run:

./tool/go run ./cmd/tsconnect build

To serve them, run:

./tool/go run ./cmd/tsconnect serve

By default the build output is placed in the dist/ directory and embedded in the binary, but this can be controlled by the -distdir flag. The -addr flag controls the interface and port that the serve listens on.

Library / NPM Package

The client is also available as an NPM package. To build it, run:

./tool/go run ./cmd/tsconnect build-pkg

That places the output in the pkg/ directory, which may then be uploaded to a package registry (or installed from the file path directly).

To do two-sided development (on both the NPM package and code that uses it), run:

./tool/go run ./cmd/tsconnect dev-pkg

This serves the module at http://localhost:9090/pkg/pkg.js and the generated wasm file at http://localhost:9090/pkg/main.wasm. The two files can be used as drop-in replacements for normal imports of the NPM module.