Mirror of the Rel4tion website/wiki source, view at <http://rel4tion.org>

Clone

HTTPS: git clone https://vervis.peers.community/repos/yEzqv

SSH: git clone USERNAME@vervis.peers.community:yEzqv

Branches

• master

Tags

authors.mdwn

The purpose of the file is to document who did which change, for the purpose of copyright. If necessary, it should be possible to use it do determine whose wrote a given file and who wrote a specific part of it.

Thanks to git, it’s now much easier to find this information, but it doesn’t mean AUTHORS is completely forgotten. It still contains a list of people. Some projects just have a list, others list maintainers and contributors in separate files, etc. Some projects auto-generate the lists using the log produced by git.

The “features” we need to consider:

• separation
  • plain list
  • active maintainers and past contributors
  • by version (like in Nautilus)
• personal details
  • name
  • gnome username
  • email
  • nickname
  • files contributed
• optional sections
  • copyright notice
  • copying notice
  • philosophy
  • references to other relevant files (ChangeLog, THANKS)
  • history (who started/created the project, when, why)

Auto-generated list can probably be made through something like this, taken from gnome-music Makefile.am:

[[!format make """ dist-hook: gen-AUTHORS

gen-AUTHORS: $(AM_V_GEN)if test -d $(srcdir)/.git; then
out=“cd $(srcdir) && git log --pretty=format:'%aN <%aE>' | sort -u” &&
perl -p -e “s/#authorslist#// and print ‘$$out’”
< $(srcdir)/AUTHORS.in > $(distdir)/AUTHORS-tmp &&
mv -f $(distdir)/AUTHORS-tmp $(distdir)/AUTHORS ;
fi """]]

Regarding the number of files in the repo, it seems that a large number of files causes confusion and makes it harder for new people to understand the structure of the project directory, what each file does and how they work together. Thus, the approach I take is to minimize the number of aux files. For example, there’s no need to have separate AUTHORS and CONTRIBUTORS and MAINTAINERS files, if all three lists can go into a single AUTHORS file with 3 sections. It removes clutter from the repo.