Re: finally: new authors

Sooo ;)

A person, thinking alone, in a room, and being brilliant with only *one* line or character is very hard to measure. We cannot measure it well by code, by lines, by characters, or even by their popularity among others.... no system has been proposed for such a case, be they doc, bugs, dev, notes, etc..... :-(

Well, nobody said that the human voting will be based on 'popularity among others'. At least I never thought. IMHO everyone who votes has something in mind about the guys contributions (which is something you may call popularity), well, yes. Philip had some suggestion to make this more objective, and some derivative of this idea also appears in your list below: to ask a 'phpdoc resume' from candidates.

OK. Can you afford to contribute time to code such a system (set of filters and stuff)?

To compare lines and changed characters? Yes, I have written much of this code already. To compare the *value* of the changes? No. :-)

Well, the latter would need artifical intelligence probably ;)

Your new examples (though trimmed) are good, and have altered my perspective.

I am happy to hear that ;)

How would you (and others) feel about the following:

Well, my first thought was that this is overly complicated, and would give a high burned on guys voting, which would drive them away from their real work.

1. Authors voting *must* read all commits.

This is something you cannot check I guess. While your starting point was that we need some system which is automated because people cannot be relied on. There are many commits at busy times a day... I read most of the commits anyway to some extent, but I don't think that this is doable.

2. Of the 20(?) fixed authors, at least half (10) must be changed per year (to ensure new credit, stimulate keeping a position of credit, and avoid author overload). If there are ten listed, 5 must be changed.

How can you 'stimulate keeping a position of credit' while you enforce 10 members to go away every year, just because this is the rule? If you have the top 20 listed the first year [let's say that this is measured by some meaningful way, not changed chars, so Hartmut won't be #1 forever ;)], do you think that will change that much after a year? Well, maybe we had a quite different group a year before, but key figures were much the same as today.

3. Depending on the systems available, the voters *should* look at changed lines/chars, XML changes, section changes, etc. They should (by charter) look at as many pieces of information as they have available to them. It is up to the candidates to provide any enhanced information beyond the current systems.

Well, this is where we connect to Philip's 'phpdoc resume' which he suggested earlier. Can voter guys read all commits (as many chars changed as possible)? I don't think so that this will work. Voters will end up not reading that stuff, and get back to base their decisions on their impressions, which you would like to avoid. So what if we employ Philip's idea of a 'phpdoc resume' which would some up all the stuff done by someone? Then voters would have a short summarized list of what someone done (from his perspective), and why he thinks he deserves getting on the list.

4. Voting should be sealed and private, to eliminate peer pressure, until votes are final.

I really don't understand this. Do you say voting should be private forever, so we should never know who voted for it, and who voted against is? Then a system restricting voting to those who are allowed (authentication, etc). is needed.

5. Discussion of their expected votes, and actual votes should be public.

Well, here it would turn out eventually who voted for and against ;)

6. A majority of the voters should be allowed to disqualify any other person from voting.

Well, we are getting to closer with every letter to my original suggestion :) As I said, voting and discussion should be open, and any negative voting should be discussed. I can accept the idea of this kind of disqualification, especially because I think there will be no need for this, so it is not a problem, if such an option exists. It seems our decision making proposals now only differ in the closed/open voting and that how many preparations should someone done before voting. I think what you propose is not doable, noone will watch for all the commits and check all the chars changed by someone before voting. This is simply too much. How many chars were changed by Friedhelm or Hartmut? ;)

7. Put us lesser authors on another page, so we can get our 6px credit. :-)

Well, I would not like to generally oppose this idea. I think we first need to collect the names which we would like to show with some "normal font size", and then get back if we have more names which we have not listed.

8. Non-voters should not be put on the updated authors list, without explaining extreme difficulty (to prune inactive authors).

This is just a question of who is qualified for voting. Let's imagine we use the system you propose. What if someone is disqualified from voting? His contribution should not be disqualified :) Just to show the weakness of this point.

ROTFL.... what make/model? :-)

Nothing expensive. I need a stable and modern one, but I have no big budget for this. There are some 900-1000$+VAT modoles in Hungary, which seem to be ok. The very low cost models here are Gericom (from Austria) and Portocom (Hungarian brand, assembled with parts from Taiwan :).

Cheap stuff, my business is doing good. Is there a good money-transfer system to there?

Heh, there probably is ;) Should I treat this seriosly?? Unbelievable... Goba