Re: Removing in-source contribution records contributer

Carlos O'Donell
2025-04-08T20:18:40Z

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.

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.