CONTRIBUTORS

[Zoltan Hidvegi <hzoli@cs.elte.hu>]

As you probably know in the distribution Etc/CONTRIBUTORS is supposed to
contain the list of people who have contributed to the development of zsh.
The RCS history of that file begins in August, 1994.  Since than one name
were removed and only three names, Richard Coleman, Zoltan Hidvegi and
Wayne Davison were added.  This means that this list is not very
up-to-date.  For example Zefram is not on this list.  The ChangeLog file
begins at Oct 16, 1994 and it is now really a replacement for the
CONTRIBUTORS file.  But most people mentioned in the CONTRIBUTORS file
cannot be found in the ChangeLog.  If I remove the CONTRIBUTORS file than
noone will know that they did something to make zsh better.  The
CONTRIBUTORS file can be updated using the ChangeLog but it would be a
quite time-consuming task.  Also the ChangeLog documents much better of the
work people did.  The manual also mentions only five developers but there
are certainly other people who did as much work as people mentioned there.

I joined the zsh development only in February last year so I do not know
much about the history of the shell.  I think it would be interesting for
others as well to know the brief history of zsh.

tcsh's history and its main developers are listed in the manuel.

pdksh has a CONTRIBUTORS file describing people who maintained the shell,
the major contributors and other contributors describing what they did.

Something like that would be more appropriate than a simple enumeration.
The question is that who should be mentioned in this file.  I think it is
not necessary to mention everybody who sent a trivial one-line bugfix as
this is already documented in the ChangeLog file.  But it is hard to draw
the line.  The difference between `major contributors' and `other
contributors' is usually more clear if one followed the development.  I
think I know who were the major contriburots since February, 1995 but I do
not know what happened before that.

Zoltan