On Sat, Jul 12, 2025 at 3:01 PM Collin Funk <collin.fu...@gmail.com> wrote: > Hi Simon, > > Simon Josefsson via Gnulib discussion list <bug-gnulib@gnu.org> writes: > > > My impression is that even maintaining an accurate list of contributors > > to thank in a THANKS file is not particular useful any more. The git > > log is a more accurate source of who did what (and consequently should > > be thanked), possibly followed by ChangeLog in the (increasingly rare) > > cases where those aren't generated from the git log. I would prefer to > > use the THANKS files for acknowledging contributions from people or > > organizations who helped in some other way (e.g., hosting, websites, > > things that inspired the project) that wouldn't be clear from the git > > log. > > > > Even the AUTHORS file is becoming a bit less useful than it was. The > > authorship should also follow from the git log. Perhaps the more useful > > thing to record is current MAINTAINER (aka code owner) of particular > > source files and/or the entire project, which is often different from > > the initial set of authors. > > > > So I find e-mail addresses in any these files just another thing that > > gets outdated quickly. But going through these files cleaning them up > > is a lot of tedious work. > > I generally agree that the 'git log' is more useful when trying to > figure out who did what, etc. But the point of THANKS is more for > distributed tarballs, in my opinion. For example on my Fedora machine: > > $ find /usr/share -name 'THANKS' 2>/dev/null | wc -l > 104 > > I think Debian gzip's them, but it has been a while. > > Anyways, I like Coreutils THANKS.in file which uses the names contained > in it, 'git log' and the thanks-gen script to generate a THANKS file. I > think all (?) of the packages Jim maintains use it. > > Maybe it would be useful to write a script to generate a THANKS file in > Gnulib, inspired by that.
Just a day or two ago, I noticed that I'd set up THANKS.in in coreutils, sed and grep. That was motivated by the rare cases in which I wanted to thank someone for a contribution for which they didn't author a git commit. It felt a little better to put the name/email mapping in that file. Then, you can thank by name only and let the THANKS.in reference handle any email disambiguation needed.
