List of Authors in aboutdata.cpp

[Ingo Klöcker]

On Sonntag, 22. August 2021 09:25:29 CEST Laurent Montel wrote:
> On dimanche 22 août 2021 00:07:57 CEST David Bryant wrote:
> > I have researched the 53 people mentioned as "Authors" in the Help widget.
> > I went through the git log to identify the date of the last contribution
> > each person made, and the total number of commits authored by each one.
> > Here are those statistics, in descending order by number of commits. I
> > drew the statistics from the total commit history on gitlab from 1997
> > through June 30, 2021.

I'm wondering whether you also included the recent commit history of the many 
different repositories KMail and its important libraries were split into?

According to the history of the old kdepim and kdepimlibs (sadly, currently 
only available on GitHub: https://github.com/KDE/kdepim and .../kdepimlibs) 
repositories, I have made 1300+ commits (git log --oneline --author=kloecker) 
to those two repositories. Since I almost exclusively contributed to KMail the 
below 1017 commits listed for me seem to be a bit too low. The below numbers, 
especially for old contributors, should be taken with a grain of salt.

> Hi,
> Thanks for looking it.
> Indeed it’s wierd that we added email from people which never made commits.

David wrote:
> > 11 of the 53 "Authors" never made a single commit. They were all
> > responsible for one or more patches committed by other people. One of the

Without having checked the actual contributions of those 11 authors, it is not 
at all weird, that those 11 people are on the list of authors because, 
obviously, those people are the authors of patches that have been committed. 
There is a reason why git differentiates between authors (those who actually 
write the code) and committers (those who merely add the code to the source 
code repository).

> Indeed this dialog box is very big as there is a lot of people.

I don't see a problem with a long list of authors. Quite the contrary.

> I am agree that we need to reduce it (Perhaps we can add a specific file in
> repo to move name of people which made less than x commits.

-1

I very much disagree with removing any names from the list of authors. Who are 
we to decide that people who have been added to the list of authors 20 years 
ago are not worth anymore to be listed?

Also, even though the list of Authors in the About dialog is not legally 
binding it should be clear that legally (cf. international copyright 
agreements) everybody who made a non-trivial source code contribution to KMail 
is a(n) co-author.

I'm okay with the maintainer deciding which new contributors (s)he deems worth 
adding to the list of authors, but, as written above, I am against the removal 
of any names from the list. I would be okay with moving the names of former 
contributors to a list "Former Authors" (maybe there's a better term than 
"Former"), if we want to give current/recent contributors more visibility.

For what it's worth, when I was maintainer of KMail in the early 2000s my rule 
was to add anybody to the list of authors who made a non-trivial contribution. 
One of my thoughts/hopes back then was that new contributors who are given 
credits in the About dialog are motivated to stay longer and contribute more. 
I think that a rule like "Your contributions are not worth adding your name to 
the About dialog until you have made 25+ commits." will motivate nobody to 
stay longer and make more contributions.

Regards,
Ingo
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