Re: Removing in-source contribution records contributer

Alejandro Colomar
2025-04-08T21:28:29Z

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Hi Carlos,

On Tue, Apr 08, 2025 at 04:18:35PM -0400, Carlos O'Donell wrote:
> On 4/8/25 8:42 AM, G. Branden Robinson wrote:
> > Hi Alex,
> >
> > At 2025-04-08T01:05:02+0200, Alejandro Colomar wrote:
> > > On Thu, Feb 13, 2025 at 12:20:58AM +0100, Alejandro Colomar wrote:
> > > > On Wed, Feb 12, 2025 at 05:02:10PM -0600, G. Branden Robinson wrote:
> > > > > If you do this, I suggest you replace these lines with something
> > > > > like:
> > > > >
> > > > > .\" See the Git revision history at
> > > > > .\" $URL
> > > > > .\" for records of changes and contributors to this file.
> > > >
> > > > Good idea.
> > >
> > > I'm thinking I won't do that. I don't want to add that overhead to
> > > each page. People interested in the history of a page will already
> > > have a look at the git history, and there they'll find the old states
> > > of a page, in which they'll find this information.
> > >
> > > And it would require some non-trivial work to add this note
> > > consistently. I'll go with a removal without replacement, I think.
> >
> > Acknowledged. It's been a whole 7 weeks for so, so I don't clearly
> > remember my reasoning from February, but my suggestion may have been at
> > attempt to find a "conservative" alteration to file content or the
> > expressed meaning of the comments.
> >
> > But, what's conservative in one dimension often is not in another, such
> > as "labor required".
> >
> > I also agree that while Git is a complex suite of tools, "git log" is
> > not among its deeper magicks. At least not when run without arguments.
>
> We did something similar in glibc and created a CONTRIBUTED-BY file at the
> top-level and moved all contribution lines out of the respective
> files into the top-level file.

Yep, a CREDITS file would be interesting. I wouldn't keep info about
which specific files were written by each contributor. That seems
something more appripriate for git-log(1). The pre-git contributions
will be visible in old versions of the pages (i.e., if one sees
Jane Random Developer in CREDITS and wonders which pages she contributed
to, they can `git log -S 'Jane Random Developer'` and similar commands
to find out.

Thanks!

Have a lovely night!
Alex

>
> e.g.
> ~~~
> The glibc project stopped adding "Contributed by" lines to source files in 2012
> in favour of acknowledging contributors in the glibc manual and through the git
> log. The record of existing "Contributed by" lines have now been moved to this
> file to acknowledge contributions by these developers to glibc.
>
> argp/argp-test.c:
> Written by Miles Bader <miles@gnu.ai.mit.edu>.
>
> argp/tst-argp1.c:
> Contributed by Ulrich Drepper <drepper@redhat.com>, 2002.
> ...
> ~~~
> The top-level CONTRIBUTED-BY has ~3,000 Contributed/Written by lines.
>
> Sme of the authors predated the use of git and so it was simpler to keep the
> lines somewhere as part of the transition away from "Contributed by"-style
> lines.
>
> --
> Cheers,
> Carlos.
>
>

--
<https://www.alejandro-colomar.es/>