Hi Frank,

On Thu, Mar 9, 2017 at 2:56 PM, Frank Lanitz <frank@frank.uvena.de> wrote:

Hi,

Currently we have apart of the git list itself two places where we have
added contributors in past, but which look quiet orphaned nowadays:

The contributors-dialog on Geany->Help:

https://github.com/geany/geany/blob/master/src/about.c

and the THANKS-file inside / of the source tree:

https://github.com/geany/geany/blob/master/THANKS

As we got a huge amount of contributors¹ all should get their kudos and
now I'm wondering how we can go on in future with it. There are
contributors for translations, code, documentation, community things
like support, donations (money) etc.

One possibility (apart from what Lex suggests which is OK too) is to list the names that the AUTHORS file shows:

https://github.com/geany/geany/blob/master/AUTHORS

or better the updated version of AUTHORS from #1148:

https://github.com/geany/geany/pull/1148/commits/b40b6ec9dfebcb7dc6911fbca085b46cfa66b43d

When you have a look here

https://github.com/geany/geany/graphs/contributors

the number of regularly code-contributing developers is quite small - I'd say it's just the first 9 plus Eugene who contributed a lot in the pre-git era (maybe there's someone else missing from that time - Enrico could know better). When you have a look at the rest of the contributor's commits, they are either 1-feature-related (e.g. SiegeLord's Rust parser), or translators.

So I think listing these people explicitly plus "thanks to all other contributors" could be enough. If someone else starts contributing regularly, he can be added but this doesn't happen so often to be a maintenance problem.

Cheers,
Frank

¹ Openhub https://www.openhub.net/p/geany says we have 42 (hihi)
contributors last year -- not counting po updates where I committed the
po files myself.

I think these actually are po updates mostly - even though you commit them, git shows the author of the patch, not the committer and there definitely weren't Geany code patches merged from 42 different people last year.

Cheers,

Jiri