"Jason St. John" <jstjohn@xxxxxxxxxx> writes: > In the Git release notes for something like "git foo > learned a new option --bar", a simple "(Thanks|Kudos) to John Smith" > at the end of each bullet point may be a good way to recognize > developers in a concise manner without needing to dig through the > output of "git log" or "git shortlog". I doubt cluttering the list of features and fixes with peoples' names is such a good idea. Earlier we did not have any detailed release notes and instead said "you can go read 'git log'", which did not help the end users who need to know what changed before or after updating their Git, and I started doing the release notes in the current format to help them. We must not forget that the primary audience of this list of features and fixes is the end user. They need a brief birds-eye summary, and the briefer and the cleaner we keep it, the better. Besides, it will be a lot of work to dig "log" for topics and then go back to list archives to see who originally raised the issue before even the first edition of the patch was written and who contributed the ideas to help the author during the review cycles. Doing that for a topic that needed to get rerolled multiple times will take a lot of work, as the backlinks to previous round of discussions are often available only in human-readable form. And the list of people who helped will have to be updated when a follow-up bugfix topics are merged [*1*]. All of the above would add too much busywork on my plate [*2*]. Do people want to see me doing busywork, or spending that time on reviewing, suggesting improvements, rejecting crap and applying patches [*3*]? > Or if that would make the release notes too cumbersome to review, what > about using systemd's method? systemd's release notes include a > "contributions from" section at the very end that lists everyone with > a patch included in the release. I can add "shortlog --no-merges -s -n v2.3.0..v2.4.0" at the end of the e-mail when the release notes is sent out. That might be a good enough balance between the usefulness of the release notes to its customers and giving credits to individuals in a way a bit more visible than "if you are interested, run shortlog yourself" [*4*]. Thanks. [Footnote] *1* Anybody remember "Git traffic" [*5*]? There was this great guy who have been summarizing the kernel traffic and soon after Git project started he did one edition of "Git traffic", summarizing a few weeks' worth of Git mailing list discussions, who came up with what idea, how that idea was discarded, what decisions were made, in readble form. Unfortunately, there was only a single edition of "Git traffic" ever published---and I can understand why. During that "inflation" age of Git, we discussed so many topics and so much was achieved in a very short period of time. It would have been impossible for any single person to follow and report on all that was happening in the Git land, unless that person wasn't Linus or me or a handful of other people---but all of us were too busy with the discussion and programming to do a summary. I really wished the publication continued, but that was wishing for an impossible. If you want the point-by-point kudos, you do need somebody who can invest time to do a good job at this, and that person cannot be me or anybody who commits text to the release notes but an attentive and devoted reporter. An algorithm would not cut it. I suspect that a workflow "improvement" to help a dumb tool to automatically produce it would be too constricting and will slow me down. *2* What we need is a group of people who are interested in this enough to volunteer themselves to keep helping whatever kudo-giving that is needed in an ongoing basis. We do not need people who pile more on _my_ plate telling _me_ how to make the world better for them and then go away without doing anything themselves. We can find them dozen a dime and they won't help this project run any smoother. *3* Rhetorical question. I have long learned that the key to make sure the project runs smoothly is to push as much work off of my plate to make sure I won't become the bottleneck. *4* Note that it does not capture anything but "these people did the final versions of the patches". We would not be giving credit to others who may have offered crucial insights to help these people. But that would give the same amount of rough estimate as the old contributors' list Christian misses from git-scm.com, and it might be good enough for somebody to see his name on it and feel good about it. *5* The site is gone, but wayback machine has a copy. https://web.archive.org/web/20050514083018/http://www.kerneltraffic.org/git/gt20050502_1.html -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe git" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html