[Geany-devel] About ChangeLog, AUTHORS and COMMITTERS files

[Colomban Wendling]

Hi guys,

I updated the build system to generate a ChangeLog from Git's log upon
dist.  I mostly used the suggestion at
https://live.gnome.org/Git/ChangeLog and it works fine.  The format is a
bit weird for a ChangeLog, but it's complete and quite clear.  And
output a ChangeLog-style format is way harder, and seem to somewhat
require an extra script parsing stuff, which is IMO quite overkill.

So, the ChangeLog is ok.  However, Matthew and I discussed a bit some
time ago about generating AUTHORS and COMMITTERS alike, see
https://github.com/geany/geany/pull/10

Although this seems to be a quite good idea, there may be a few
problems.  Generating AUTHORS is quite easy.  It of course wouldn't keep
the "developers" vs. "contributers" distinction, but the list could e.g.
be sorted by amount of commits, so somewhat by importance.

The problem comes with COMMITTERS.  Although it's quite easy to list all
the people having committed a commit that's in geany.git's master, this
list will also include the people having committed something that later
got merged.  And then COMMITTERS becomes quite useless since it doesn't
reflect the reality.

So, is there a way to only list people having committed directly to
master, e.g. not in a branch first?  If yes, it could be a solution.  I
would possibly remove quite a bit of actually relevant commits, but it's
also likely that if a committer was legitimate it would also have
committed something straight to master (even a merge of his branch).

And if the answer to the above question is "no", what do you think is
the best?  Just keep the hand-made AUTHORS and COMMITTERS?
Auto-generate AUTHORS and keep the hand-made COMMITTERS?  Something else?

If we have a solution before tomorrow evening we could have it in 1.22,
otherwise it'll be as it is now in that release (not a big deal IMO).


Regards,
Colomban