List of Authors in aboutdata.cpp

[David Bryant]

On Monday, August 23, 2021 3:54:21 AM CDT Ingo Klöcker wrote:
> Isnip the bit about which repo Bryant drew his data from]
> 
> I'm wondering whether you also included the recent commit history of the
> many different repositories KMail and its important libraries were split
> into?
> 


No. I just used the "kmail" repo from GitLab.


> 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 ... 


Well, I had drawn up a report, which is atttached. But that only includes some 26,000 
commits, from the "kmail" repo on GitLab. I cloned the github libraries mentioned above 
this mornng. There are about 96,000 commits in "kdepim", and 22,000 in "kdepimlibs". So 
that's ~350% more than I had included originally. *But I notice the github logs only include 
history through August, 2016.* I'll summarize all the data sometime, when I figure out 
where to find it all. It's a bit of work, because many people have spelled their names two 
different ways, etc. And it will have to come from many different repos, apparently.


Just FYI, Ingo, I find 1,268 lines in those two github log files that say "Author: Ingo K...". 
Your last name is spelled two different ways. I suppose it has something to do with UTF-8, 
which didn't exist when the KMail project started. If I just use Kate to search for "ingo " I 
get 1,352 matches in the first file (kdepim) and 53 in the second (kdepimlibs). So far as I 
can see, you are the only Ingo mentioned in any of these files. There is a guy named Rich 
Birch <ringo at albumsnaps.com>, so the blank is important. I had some trouble with the 
search function in Kate ... it hangs fire sometimes, and I have to kick it in the pants to get it 
to search the whole file. It's sort of large (34 MiB all together).


> [snip some stuff ...]
> 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).


That's not how I interpret the log file, Ingo. I see lines like this:
commit b127ab527214b5e24a25dba737c0add4665d65f6
Author: Ingo Klöcker <kloecker at kde.org>
Date:   Sun Jan 9 00:44:56 2005 +0000


So it appears that every commit has an Author, while patches show up like this:
Patch by Sandro Knauss


I understand your point, that writing the code to make a patch is usually harder than 
performing the purely clerical function of adding the new code to a repository. But most 
of the time people commit patches they have authored themselves. For example, there are 
97,679 commits in the kdepim repo, while the word "patch " only occurs 1,599 times in the 
entire log file. And the majority of the occurrences of "patch " appear to be used in the 
commit message as a description of what the committer is doing, not to attribute 
authorship to somebody else. Compiling these statistics is hard enough if I rely on git to 
define what "Author" means. I might be able to read and interpret 100,000 commit 
messages before I die. But I don't want to go there.


> 
> > [Monte] Indeed this dialog box is very big as there is a lot of people.
> 
> [Ingo] I don't see a problem with a long list of authors. Quite the
> contrary.
> 
> > [Montel] 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
> 
> [Ingo] 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?
> 


I don't necessarily want to remove any names. I want to (a) recognize people who joined 
the project fewer than 15 years ago and (b) reconcile discrepanciies between the credits in 
the "Handbook" and the list that pops up in Help --> About Kmail. I'm new here, and it 
looks to me as if nobody has paid much attention to this in a long time. I really just want 
to be fair to everybody who has had a hand in the project, to the extent that is feasible.


> [snip ...]
> 
> 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.
> 


I'm not going to argue the point, Ingo. But nobody's name has been added to the "About" 
dialog since 2008, or 2009. Your thinking makes sense, but it has little real world effect 
when even someone like Daniel Vrátil (128 commits to the Kmail repo) gets no mention at 
all, while Guillaume Laurent (2 commits) is listed as an author. And the only reason for 
that, apparently, is that Guillame made his contributions in 2000 and 2001, while Daniel 
didn't join the project until 2012. Whar real purpose does an "incentive" serve if nobody 
ever gets the reward? Even the lottery ticcket buyer has one chance in a million, or so.


Here, I've rambled on long enough. The following report was drawn from the "kmail" repo 
on Gitlab. Log file runs through August 20, 2021. People currently listed as "Authors" are 
listed *in red*, and "*Thanks to*" are in light blue. I'll update this list once I figure out how 
to obtain complete git log data.
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