613653 - update credits page and figure out way to keep it up-to-date

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Add-on SDK Graveyard :: Documentation, defect)

Description

[Myk Melez [:myk] [@mykmelez]]

The credits page is woefully out-of-date.  We need to bring it back up-to-date and then keep it that way or remove it, since an out-of-date page is worse than no page at all for people who should be on it but aren't.

At first glance, at least the following names are missing:

Will Bamberg
Irakli Gozalishvili
Alexandre Poirot
Piotr Zalewa
Justin Scott (fligtar)
Dave Townsend (mossop)
Zbigniew Braniecki (gandalf)
Zandr Milewski

Comment 1

[Drew Willcoxon :adw]

GitHub has a contributors list:
https://github.com/mozilla/addon-sdk/contributors

Since that excludes people like Zandr who might not necessarily touch the repo yet contribute, it's not really sufficient to only point to it.  I also think it's a bad idea to list "GitHub contributors" and "non-GitHub contributors" in separate places, e.g., by listing the latter in our credits file and including a link to the former in the same file, since that might be construed as valuing one differently than the other.

We could write a script that fetches contributors from GitHub, combines them with a list of non-GitHub contributors, and updates our own credits file.  Running this script would become part of the release process.  What do people think about that?

GitHub provides an API for getting contributors:
http://develop.github.com/p/repo.html

e.g.:
http://github.com/api/v2/yaml/repos/show/mozilla/addon-sdk/contributors

But it lists GitHub nicknames, often without email addresses and full names.  A better way might be to parse the commit history, which does include full names and emails:

http://github.com/api/v2/yaml/commits/list/mozilla/addon-sdk/master

Comment 2

[Drew Willcoxon :adw]

(In reply to comment #1)
> But it lists GitHub nicknames, often without email addresses and full names.  A
> better way might be to parse the commit history, which does include full names
> and emails:

Oh, but it only lists "recent commits", 35 at most it looks like.

Comment 3

[Drew Willcoxon :adw]

Of course, if the script is run from within a git clone on a machine with git installed, it could query the clone for contributors rather than asking GitHub.  Duplicates ("Drew Willcoxon" and "Drew Willcoxon :adw") and weird names ("[e-mail]") would need to be resolved.

http://www.google.com/search?q=git+list+contributors

Comment 4

[Myk Melez [:myk] [@mykmelez]]

Alternately, we could get committers to commit to updating the list whenever they push anyone else's patch.

Comment 5

[Drew Willcoxon :adw]

They (we) have done a great job so far!  If everyone is responsible for it then no one is.  If it stays accurate at all, one person will end up doing it for everybody else, so we should either make it easy for that person or just remove the file entirely.

Comment 6

[Drew Willcoxon :adw]

Attachment: patch

Anyhow... :)  This includes the list above and the output of `git log --format='%aN' | sort -u`.

Comment 7

[Myk Melez [:myk] [@mykmelez]]

Comment on attachment 492921 [details] [diff] [review]
patch

Looks good.  Please also add Ayan Shah to the list when checking this in.

I have also added an item to the release checklist about updating the page so it becomes part of the release process <https://wiki.mozilla.org/Labs/Jetpack/Release#Update_Credits_Page>.

Comment 8

[Drew Willcoxon :adw]

https://github.com/mozilla/addon-sdk/commit/a0a9245151dfd502e9510159ac333206f3a28ff9

https://github.com/mozilla/addon-sdk/commit/44873ebea8fedc43ae6520a55bf54615d9e7aafb

https://github.com/mozilla/addon-sdk/commit/26cf5b1c79113e4670c25cbc39409e668fee8a2d