So who decides who is "deserving" of this? For instance, I have
committed several things in the past by being the resident PHP.Net
grammar nazi (including the entire FTP section of the manual.) However,
I haven't committed much of anything in the past few months, as I've
been swamped with contracts. So am I deserving because I've contributed
a fair amount in the past, or am I not deserving because I haven't
contributed anything in the past 6 months or so? Who decides?
Well, as I have proposed some letters back, I think some voting mechanism should be done. After the initial new list is done, there won't be too much change on the list too often (if it is done how I imagine it with grouping guys by the nature and amount of their quality contributions and not by some machine measurements). Don't be afraid of not being listed. As I have said, I have not proposed a long list of contributors as I would probably leave out some people... It is now the chance to step up, but as the list will be here for the active editors to change in the future (or anybody else who is elected to be the person responsible for it) there is the possibility to get in even for contributions in the past if one deserves it.
Note that I'm NOT arguing that your idea is a bad one; I think your
original post sums up the problem and solutions quite nicely. What is
remaining is to hash out the details. Do we only post everyone who has
committed something in the past x days, or do we only post people over x
number of commits, or some combination thereof? Or do we post everyone
and risk the list getting out of hand and perhaps stale? Sure, I'd love
to list everyone on the team, regardless of when they last committed a
fix and how many fixes they have committed, but I realize that being on
a list of 400 or 600 authors is probably just as bad as not being on a
list at all.
Yes, this is the point, and this is what we would not like to get. being a boring list of names is not too encouraging, don't you think? Being on some list with appropriate contributions listed, edited by hand is another question. We would not like to start the hand edited list with excluding names from it, but with organizing the list into some reader friendly structure. Like the phpcredits() list is organized (which is also not done from CVS commits).
To put it the other way: am I proud of being listed on the PEAR page as one contributor? No. As I proud to being part of phpcredits() as one member of the website team? Yes. This list was created by guys who respect my work, and not assembled by some program automatically giving some sort of recognition for me...
I think it would be important to set a minimum for being listed (even if
we don't show it on the page), and I think this is what my earlier email
was getting at. What if we say we'll post everyone who has had at least
5 commits in the past 6 months? This would set a reasonable "floor", so
as to prevent the list from getting out of hand. At the same time, it
would encourage those who haven't committed a fix in a while to start
contributing again.
It would be interesting to see who *would* be on this list.
I think the list should be dynamic (i.e. if I commit
5 fixes today and I've been inactive for a year, the list should
automatically update within the next day or two to reflect this.) That
way we leave out the human error and politics that comes along with a
hand-selected list.
I am absolutely against any automation, as described in my past emails and above.
Goba