CONTRIBUTORS file again

CONTRIBUTORS file again

[Zoltan Hidvegi]

I recently asked your opininions about the CONTRIBUTORS file but noone
replied.  Does that means that noone is concerned about that and everyone
is satisfied with the present situation?

I cannot rewrite CONTRIBUTORS alone because I do not know what happened in
the development of zsh before 1995.  If you lost my original mail about
that I can send it again.

Zoltan

Re: CONTRIBUTORS file again

[Bart Schaefer]

On Jul 9,  3:39am, Zoltan Hidvegi wrote:
} Subject: CONTRIBUTORS file again
}
} I recently asked your opininions about the CONTRIBUTORS file but noone
} replied.  Does that means that noone is concerned about that and everyone
} is satisfied with the present situation?

Have we completely lost the changelogs etc. from 2.5 and before?  (I note
the one in the zsh dist only goes back to where 2.6 started.)

How far back do the zsh-list (the old monolithic list) archives go?  I
have an incomplete archive of it going back several years, but ...

(I have, for example, the first message Richard Coleman ever posted to
zsh-list.  I tried to forward it the day he handed the archive over to
Zoltan, but at that time I wasn't aware posting to zsh-announce was
restricted, so it vanished into the ether.)

} I cannot rewrite CONTRIBUTORS alone because I do not know what happened in
} the development of zsh before 1995.  If you lost my original mail about
} that I can send it again.

I know some of what happened going back to before Paul F. graduated ...
to 1990 or so? ... but as I've mentioned, I was pretty much ignoring
things from around 2.4.100 through about 2.6-beta9; and the machine
on which I kept the really ancient sources died a while back.  Anyway,
Paul and I were trading mail about zsh before there was a zsh-list,
so it all sort of blurs together at this point.  And of course there
were people at Princeton who were involved longer ago than I was.

Do you have some idea what you're hoping to include?

-- 
Bart Schaefer                             Brass Lantern Enterprises
http://www.well.com/user/barts            http://www.nbn.com/people/lantern

New male in /home/schaefer:
>N  2 Justin William Schaefer  Sat May 11 03:43  53/4040  "Happy Birthday"

Re: CONTRIBUTORS file again

[Zoltan Hidvegi]

> On Jul 9,  3:39am, Zoltan Hidvegi wrote:
> } Subject: CONTRIBUTORS file again
> }
> } I recently asked your opininions about the CONTRIBUTORS file but noone
> } replied.  Does that means that noone is concerned about that and everyone
> } is satisfied with the present situation?
> 
> Have we completely lost the changelogs etc. from 2.5 and before?  (I note
> the one in the zsh dist only goes back to where 2.6 started.)

zsh-2.5.03.tar.gz contains a ChangeLog from Richard describing changes
between July 20 and August 2, 1994.  There is no other ChangeLog in 2.5.
zsh-2.3.1 has a list of contributors and a changelog in the README but
there are not names in the changelog part.

> } I cannot rewrite CONTRIBUTORS alone because I do not know what happened in
> } the development of zsh before 1995.  If you lost my original mail about
> } that I can send it again.
> 
> I know some of what happened going back to before Paul F. graduated ...
> to 1990 or so? ... but as I've mentioned, I was pretty much ignoring
> things from around 2.4.100 through about 2.6-beta9; and the machine
> on which I kept the really ancient sources died a while back.  Anyway,
> Paul and I were trading mail about zsh before there was a zsh-list,
> so it all sort of blurs together at this point.  And of course there
> were people at Princeton who were involved longer ago than I was.
> 
> Do you have some idea what you're hoping to include?

Perhaps I'll include the current CONTRIBUTORS removing those added during
the 2.6 development (this just means that Wayne Davison and myself will be
removed but not Richard since it seems to me that zsh-2.5.02 and zsh-2.5.03
were put together by him) and rename it to something like CONTRIBUTORS-2.5.

Then I'll create a new file mentioning the major contributors to zsh-3.0
noting that other people who have submitted submitted patches are mentioned
in the ChangeLog.  This means that I do not have to think about what
happened before 2.5.

But these two files may be put together keeping the name CONTRIBUTORS,
perhaps that's even better.

It is partly just my personal curiousity about what happened before I
joined the development.  Peter's original RCS file of the FAQ would tell a
lot about that.  I still hape that he'll find that one day.  The header of
the FAQ included in 2.3.1 is FAQ,v 1.3 1993/02/04 so probably that file
started sometime near the end of 1992 (that's the time when I got my first
Internet account :-)).

Zoltan

Re: CONTRIBUTORS file again

[Zefram]

>Perhaps I'll include the current CONTRIBUTORS removing those added during
>the 2.6 development (this just means that Wayne Davison and myself will be
>removed but not Richard since it seems to me that zsh-2.5.02 and zsh-2.5.03
>were put together by him) and rename it to something like CONTRIBUTORS-2.5.
>
>Then I'll create a new file mentioning the major contributors to zsh-3.0
>noting that other people who have submitted submitted patches are mentioned
>in the ChangeLog.  This means that I do not have to think about what
>happened before 2.5.

That's a reasonable idea, but it just means that we get a new, short,
file for every major version.

>But these two files may be put together keeping the name CONTRIBUTORS,
>perhaps that's even better.

I think so, but it would be good to have more than just a list of names
in that case.  Just mention which areas each person has hacked, and in
which major versions.

I think the details of what you do with CONTRIBUTORS doesn't matter,
provided you (a) keep the existing credits in some form and (b) credit
recent developers in some way.

>started sometime near the end of 1992 (that's the time when I got my first
>Internet account :-)).

Wow, that means I was on-line before you were.  I was `around' on JaNet
(the British academic network) in 1988-1990 or so.  (Nothing like the
modern Internet, of course, but there was some semblance of a
connection to ARPANET.)

-zefram

Re: CONTRIBUTORS file again

[Peter Stephenson]

hzoli@cs.elte.hu wrote:
> I recently asked your opininions about the CONTRIBUTORS file but noone
> replied.  Does that means that noone is concerned about that and everyone
> is satisfied with the present situation?

I think that means no-one's too worried.  At the least, if you're
planning on doing something different for the new version, it doesn't
seem unreasonable just to leave everyone else's name in a simple list
where they've always been.  I don't think you're morally obliged to
dig back before the last full public release; maybe others have a more
developed morality.  (After all, the fact the new version is called
3.0 rather than 2.7 is largely due to the recent work of Richard,
Zoltan, Zefram etc.)  Of course, I certainly don't think any of the
earlier contributors should be deleted; I'm sure the contributors list
isn't growing any faster than the shell itself :-/.

-- 
Peter Stephenson <pws@ifh.de>       Tel: +49 33762 77366
WWW:  http://www.ifh.de/~pws/       Fax: +49 33762 77330
Deutches Electronen-Synchrotron --- Institut fuer Hochenergiephysik Zeuthen
DESY-IfH, 15735 Zeuthen, Germany.