Re: [PATCH 2/2] Add Author and Documentation sections to git-for-each-ref.txt

[Jeff King <peff@peff.net>]

On Wed, Mar 09, 2011 at 12:17:53PM -0800, Junio C Hamano wrote:

> As the project and the community grew, and also as the internal machinery
> infrastructure got more modularized, I think ownership at the individual
> command level has become almost meaningless concept.
> 
> Same reasoning applies to the "Documented by".  I think it's time for
> these two sections to go from most (if not all) pages.

Yeah, I would just as soon drop Author and Documented-by fields in all
manpages. We could replace them with a single "Credits" in git(1). It
can either mention nobody, very few people (like Linus as the originator
and Junio as the long-time maintainer), or the top N (for N < 20 or so)
people in shortlog. And then mention that you can run shortlog yourself.

I would probably do something like this:

diff --git a/Documentation/git.txt b/Documentation/git.txt
index 0c32d45..4323843 100644
--- a/Documentation/git.txt
+++ b/Documentation/git.txt
@@ -745,16 +745,10 @@ unmerged version of a file when a merge is in progress.
 
 Authors
 -------
-* git's founding father is Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>.
-* The current git nurse is Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>.
-* The git potty was written by Andreas Ericsson <ae@op5.se>.
-* General upbringing is handled by the git-list <git@vger.kernel.org>.
-
-Documentation
---------------
-The documentation for git suite was started by David Greaves
-<david@dgreaves.com>, and later enhanced greatly by the
-contributors on the git-list <git@vger.kernel.org>.
+Git was started by Linus Torvalds, and is currently maintained by Junio
+C Hamano. Numerous contributions have come from the git mailing list
+<git@vger.kernel.org>. For a complete list of contributors, see
+linkgit:git-shortlog[1] and linkgit:git-blame[1].
 
 Reporting Bugs
 --------------

And then a follow-on patch to drop the Authors section from all of the
other pages.

-Peff