Hi,
After some people suggested we list all phpdoc committers as credited contributors, I decided to look around a bit to the different php.net subproject crediting practices. Here is a brief look at some of them:
----------------------------------------------------------- Smarty (both in source code and documentation):
Authors listed:
Monte Ohrt <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Andrei Zmievski <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>Some of the committers just on the compiler class:
messju (most heavy committer lately),
andrey, andrei, mohrt, cellog----------------------------------------------------------- PEAR (I have picked the DB class since it is one of the most active ones):
PEAR has the concept of maintainers, which by definition means actively working people. The DB class has 4 maintainers, other contributors are not mentioned.
----------------------------------------------------------- PECL (I have picked the imagick extension here, which is one of the oldest ones).
Since PECL born out of PEAR, it also has the concept of maintainers, and the imagick module has two maintainers. Others, including pajoye, fmk and mj contributed to the module, but they are not mentioned.
----------------------------------------------------------- PHP itself. See your phpcredits() page, I use the php.net/credits page for reference. I have picked the MySQL extension as the prime example. Look at the table:
MySQL : Zeev Suraski, Zak Greant, Georg Richter
Is this to beleive? I guess noone doubts that this is far from a complete list of the MySQL extension contributors and authors.
----------------------------------------------------------- PHP website
Gabor Hojtsy, Colin Viebrock, Jim Winstead
Ehem, there were a lot more contributors, even before I had no CVS account. -----------------------------------------------------------
If you watch closely, you see two distinct approaches here. One is to credit *only the first* defining people behind some entity (PHP itself and smarty are examples for this approach). The PEAR, PECL and PHP website approach seems to be to credit *only the active* people behind the projects (thus the concept of maintainer comes to existance). The PHP source code approach (Andi and Zeev are the authors and maintainers of PHP, Alexander Aulbach, et.al. are the authors of the manual and stuff) is under attack by some people.
None of the above come any close in detail to the type of lists I have added for the user note maintainers (altough I have not added all user note maintainers to any of the lists, just some top people). And none of them come any closer to the limited list of current and previous authors I have proposed. Looking at the above I see that we are going to do much more to credit people than any of the other PHP.net projects, even if we only list some limited number of people. My suggested approach mixes the 'maintainer' and 'defining people of the past' by putting the most important maintainers on the frontpage, and listing 'defining people of the past' on the crediting page. This IMHO gives the best of the two worlds. Sure it does not list ALL contributors, but we have no such example around us, so I don't see why picking people out is evil. It worked for all the projects above.
Goba
